Farley, Terri - Seven Tears into the Sea

[oyceter]

Seven years ago, ten-year-old Gwen Cooke was found wandering on the beach at midnight; her stories of a dark-eyed Gypsy boy caused so many rumors that her family moved out of town. Now seventeen, Gwen is back to help out her grandmother for the summer. She's trying to cope with what happened all those years ago, but her grandmother's tales of selkies and her attraction to Jesse, a mysterious dark-eyed boy who shows up out of the blue, aren't helping much.

I wanted to like this book much more than I actually did. While I have liked books that have combined the modern YA coming-of-age story with the supernatural (Margaret Mahy's The Changeover, Annette Curtis Klause's The Silver Kiss), I don't think that this book is quite so good at bringing together the disparate elements. Gwen and her friends are very contemporary, but the feel of the ocean-side town Gwen's grandmother lives in is of a place not quite anchored in time. These two factors alone would be ok, except Gwen seems to adapt much too quickly to the little town (and having no computer or internet, gasp!) than I would expect someone of her age to, and the assumption does seem to be that the book is set in the present-day.

The clash between the traditional and the modern is even more jarring when the romance begins. Jesse's true self is pretty obvious from the start to the reader, so I think Farley relies on Gwen's skepticism to propel the story forward and keep the mystery going. Unfortunately, Farley also needs Gwen to be sufficiently attracted to Jesse for the story to work, and the combination of attraction and skepticism really doesn't work for me. To be honest, if I were a normal teenager right now (as opposed to a rather decidedly odd twenty-some-person), I would be pretty freaked out by some random guy who came up to me and claimed to be my mate, no matter how deep and dark and pretty his eyes were.

Come to think of it, I would probably think that even as a rather decidedly odd twenty-some-person.

Also, I feel like I would be a bit off put to discover that said guy was up for life-long commitment, especially if I were still in high school. Maybe that's just me though.

I think I would have bought into it more if there had been some sort of disparity between the modern day and the ancient myth, but there's just enough to highlight that the strange boundary exists, but not enough to actually create a problematic divide.

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

It's not just you.

I read this this weekend, too. Wonder if we saw the same person mention it at the same time? I can't remember who it was, but I know I saw it talked-about 'round these parts.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just jealous; I've always wanted to write a beach town selkie story (have half of one, but it was so ordinary content-wise that I grounded it until it understands what it did wrong and is ready to apologize). But this book came _so_ close to being really good, that it disappointed me all the more when it wasn't, quite. Your 'not quite anchored' is...yes. The setting is not _quite_ working for me. The characters are not _quite_ believable.

Too bad, alas.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I mentioned the book in my LJ a while back--I liked the setting a lot, though the ending felt rushed to me.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I think I saw oracne's write-up on it!

I had no idea beach town selkie stories were.... er... plural. Cool.

I really wanted it to work too, which may have been part of why it didn't. Hrm.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I don't know if the beach town selkies are common, exactly. Or that it would bother me if they were, if I felt like I had something interesting to say about them. Alas, I did not--it was just going to be a Generic Selkie Story.

So it is on hold, and hoping for better things.