Mer-ending for the Mermaid Series

As we bid farewell to the mermaids, fear not because a new series is about to begin!  Here though, is the Mer-ending:

The Merbaby by Teresa Bateman

Illustrated by Patience Brewster

2001  Holiday House

This is a beautifully illustrated children’s story about two brothers who have different ideas when they come upon a merbaby in the sea.  Tarron wants to charge admission for crowds to see her and make his fortune while Josh wants to return her to her merfolk.

In the end there came to be a sheen of silver as thousands of tails splashed in the ocean.  The merfolk brought treasures (pearl necklaces, gold coins , jewels, etc.) and loaded them onto the ship in exchange for Meri, the merbaby, to be returned to her people.  Josh didn’t want a reward but wanted to do what was best for Meri but the merfolk considered him a mer-friend and were happy to repay him for his courage.  In the end the brother’s had their money but the biggest treasure for Josh was the memory of the merbaby’s smile.

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Splash

DVD Starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah

20th Anniversary Edition  $5.00 (1984)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfTeLlXxeI

Here is a classic mermaid movie about a workaholic who believes he cannot fall in love until he is rescued at sea by a mermaid.  It’s a funny heartwarming romance that will delight!  It gets a **** 4 star rating!  If you love mermaids, this is one you must see!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMIsXdoj2vU

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I hope you have enjoyed the mermaid series!  Stay tuned for the next series coming right up!

Children’s Mermaid Books

The Mermaid’s Manuel by Dawn Apperley

Shimmer, Sparkle and Become a little Mermaid

2004

This is by far my favorite children’s mermaid book!  It’s completely interactive and snaps closed.  Each page has pieces that come out like the “Certification of a student at the Magic Mermaid School.”  It teaches the students how to become a fully qualified mermaid.  Here are some of the lessons:

1. Swish your tail from side to side gracefully.
2. Perfect the classic shimmy stroke.
3. Learn the dazzle glide.
4. Collect and learn the names of your favorite shells.
5. Slip your shells onto a pretty pearl bracelet (included in the book in a shell pouch).
6. Maintain your hair with seaweed hair extensions, a starfish braid, or a sea twirl.
7. Learn the special names of your glitzy gems (pop out shells with gem pictures).
8. Adorn yourself with your jewels and keep them in your treasure chest.
9. Maintain your make up booth with:  stardust, ocean spray, moon beams, lip shine, nail glitter, splash blue eye shimmer, and the Secret Sea Sparkle Recipe=mix glitter and body lotion and rub on your tummy (sh! remember it’s a secret).

Wonderful!  You’re ready to graduate and here’s your party:

• a gorgeous glittery twinkly tiara
• a magical secret sea locket.
• enjoy seaweed chips, a sea smoothie and splash around with your friends and pick up your student card!

I rate this book with an easy ***** 5 stars and it’s easy to see why.  Any little girl would love to read and play with this delightful shimmery shiny book!  Do you know a little one who would just love this treasure of a book?  I know one and her name is Tarynn!  She absolutely loves this book (and all the mermaids in my collection which she hopes to receive one day).  All in good time my dear…

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Mermaids:  A Magic 3-Dimensional World of Mermaids

by Gaby Goldsack   2007

Illustrated by Susanna Lockheart

In this 3 dimensional book you’ll enter the underwater world of Mermaids.  You’ll meet princess Melody and all of her friends.  You’ll learn about:

1. Life underneath the waves.
2. The school in the ocean.
3. How mermaids play.
4. Mermaid’s work.
5. Story time in the nursery.
6. The Spring-Tide ball.

In Sea School you’ll learn to sing sweetly, Sea science (animals and plants) and Sea Survival (swimming and life saving and about humans). You’ll play in the Coral Forest and the pearl Palace were the oysters live.  You’ll feed the fish and clean the coral, tend your garden of seaweed and sea squirts, collect shells and sea glass, and groom the seahorses.  You’ll also read to the merbabies.  At the Spring Tide Ball you will dance (even the grandmers do).  You’ll get to eat crispy seaweed sweets and clamshell fairy cakes.  It’s a wonderful life!

I highly recommend this book as well!

  

 

 

The Million Dollar Mermaid–Behind the Scenes!

This movie has some very interesting tidbits of information regarding Esther Williams.  Let’s see what they are because I’m pretty sure you’ll be shocked by some of them!

Behind the Scenes and Esther Williams History:

• MGM built a $250,000 pool for Esther that was 90 feet wide,  90 feet long, and 25 feet deep.
• They used an underwater bucket to film the special effects and hold equipment.
• They created fountains, geysers, fireworks, and a hydraulic pedestal to raise her as far as 50 feet out of water.
• During one of her high dives she cracked 3 vertebrae and spent 6 months in a body cast.
• She ruptured her eardrum after performing a 50 foot dive that she practiced 7 times.
• In one of her underwater performances the glass broke when she dove into the tank and she ended up with a spinal injury.

Now for some history unrelated to her water extravaganzas:

• Her family took in a 16 year old boy who repeatedly raped her for 2 years.  When she told her parents they blamed her somewhat.
• She found refuge in swimming.
• She also found refuge in 4 marriages.
• She won the national title for the 100 meter freestyle race in 1939.
• She was slated to compete at the Olympics in 1940 but she wasn’t able to because World War II broke out.  This is what sent her to Hollywood to pursue other water sports.
• Esther and Cary Grant once took LSD (acid) in order to “get her mental state in balance”~~okay??!!  Apparently, it worked some of the time (she did have several injuries so maybe not…).
• She died in 2013 in her sleep at the age of 91.
• RIP Esther–you brought so much beauty and joy to the world with your swimming/dancing skills.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjlcMjAlbu8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFQVj-5U1YM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akQiZTlXn0M

 

 

The Million Dollar $$$$ Mermaid

Yes, you’re viewing this correctly.  The next mermaid movie is one I had taped years ago on a VHS video tape!

I knew I had this movie somewhere so I dug into the back of my movies and I found it–a color version of The Million $$ Dollar Mermaid starring Esther Williams in 1952.  The water diving/dancing/synchronized swimming sections of this movie are fantastic!! Amazing! Worth viewing just because of those scenes.

This movie was based on a true story about Annette Kellerman from the 1900’s in Australia..  She was a crippled 6 year old that wore braces on her legs.  She kept wandering off and one day her father found her walking into the lake and swimming.  She started competing in swim races and won them all, breaking records everywhere.  Annette actually invented synchronized swimming (water ballet) by practicing in a pool.  (I, as a child, grew up with a pool and I was a little mermaid–I loved swimming.  My mother had been a dancer and she taught my sister and I, along with neighborhood friends, how to do synchronized swimming.  I loved it!).

The movie begins with the above and quickly shifts with her attempting to swim the Thames River in London in the fog!!  Her promoter, Jimmy, was in a small boat traveling with her down the river, even when she came against the tide.  She was told to give up but she would not!  From there, she was to swim to a lighthouse (20 miles) on Revere Beach  but was arrested!  She was wearing a one piece bathing suit which was considered scandalous at the time.  She went to trial for indecent exposure and agreed to wear a men’s racing suit and the case was dropped.

Take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un0w7WyRgsc

Later Jimmy created a water carnival where she demonstrated dives and swimming strokes to the audience and was billed as the Aquatic Marvel.  After some time, she was offered a job at the New York Hippodrome as the Australian Mermaid.  She wore a suit sewn with 50,000 gold sequins and a crown, and swam her way through colored water fountains that would rival The Bellagio in Vegas today!  She would:

• rise out of the water on a platform with sparklers
• flow down slides at a very fast speed, standing
• appear through red and yellow smoke
• appear on a flying trapeze
• swim into a huge underwater clamshell

As the show grew and changed she was billed as:

• The Goddess of the Sea
• The Wonder Woman of the Water

These water extravaganzas included 100 background swimmers, 12 swings with which they would jump into the water, and she also performed with Johnny Weissmuller (the original Tarzan) in a production called Aquacade.

Here’s a peek:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX9jNPO22yo

This movie rates ***** 5 stars from me.  The water show sequences were amazing, especially for 1952, and I would highly recommend watching this movie if for no other reason that to experience the fabulous water shows!

Next time I will reveal some interesting behind the scenes facts!  They have something to do with LSD, cracked vertebrae, bucket cameras, geysers, Cary Grant, a $250,000 pool, and the Olympics!  There’s a lot to share.  Until next time…

Mermaid Books for Tweens and Adults

A Serenade of Mermaids collected and retold by Shirley Climo

Illustrated by Lisa Falkenstern

Harper Trophy Publishers, 1997

A Trophy Chapter Book

Here is a great book for tweens and if your tween isn’t into reading, this just might hook them! Being a former teacher with a Masters Degree in Reading Education, I can’t help but try to encourage children to read.  This book is comprised of mermaid tales from around the world–Ireland, Alaska, Greece, Switzerland, Iceland, Japan, Scotland, and New Zealand.  Each story begins with a historic informational introduction.  Each story is about 6 pages long as you move through the world and the mystical mermaid tales/tails  🙂

So if your child wants to meet a mermaid, they’ll find one here in this book that might appeal to them!  Let them plunge into the deep but be careful…not all mermaids can be trusted!

Under the Mermaid Angel by Martha Moore

ALA Best Book for Young Adults

Bantam Doubleday Dell Books, 1995

This is a chapter book about a 13 year old girl living in Texas in a trailer park and she is feeling rotten about herself!  Her hair is the color of dirt and she’s sharing her room with her 5 year old sister–what could be worse?!  Then someone named Roxanne bursts into her life and moves in next door.  Roxanne’s red hair and wild ways worry her mother but not Jesse.  She’s eager to see a world touched by magic!  Roxanne makes everything fun (and I’m not just saying that because my name also happens to be Roxanne)!  One night they go out to look at the stars and Roxanne tells her, “…when falling stars hit the ocean, they harden and become starfish!”  She’s got a kookie way of looking at life and it makes Jesse smile again.

Sleeping With the Fishes

and

Swimming Without a Net

by Mary Janice Davidson

Two novels for adults.  When I began reading the first book, I enjoyed the fun mermaid references about this mermaid/girl named Fred who lived on land.  She was a cranky character with blue hair (ocean colored). She worked at an aquarium where something fishy was going on.  But as I continued to read, the style of writing made me think I was reading a chapter book for tweens.  But I also noticed all the “f” bombs.  Not that I mind them but they aren’t for kids.  I had to check the book reviews and here’s a sampling:

• “A darkly comic sensibility”
• “Her prose zings from wisecrack to wisecrack” (that’s true)
• “A zany amusing fantasy”

It was for adults but not for me.  It’s a quick read if you like this style but I only read about half of it and couldn’t take the childish style.  I never read the second one.  You can find them in the bookstore, through Amazon, or at my next garage sale  😦

So there ya go!

Mermaid Book

First up, a fictional novel for adults:  The Mermaid Collector by Erika Marks.

If you like the idea of mermaids and their magic, you’ll like this book.  It harkens back to what we have discovered about mermaids–they lure men away.  In this novel, there is a legend about 4 men who left their lives and wives for their mermaid lovers in 1888.  It is the backdrop for this book.  In honor of this legend the town holds a Mermaid Festival every August.  It is marked by the wind chimes hung from porches in order to drown out the calling of the mermaid’s songs.

The main character, Tess, is connected to the ocean from which she lost her mother.  She is hired to carve a wooden mermaid for the festival.  Two other main characters enter, Tom and his brother Dean, who have issues of their own.  The entire book is really about the festival but interestingly enough, only a few pages at the end deal with the actual festivities.  There are long buried secrets and desires to deal with…

It was enjoyable but I wished for much more of the actual Mermaid Festival.  I am rating this book with *** 3 stars.  But since I wanted the book to include more, here are the highlights of the festival:

• pink and purple horses and emerald green dolphins on a carousel ride
• bowls of hot blueberry crumbles and melting ice cream
• musicians walking along the sidewalks

And the biggest part of the festivities was The Dash:

• a mountain of shoes piled high on the cold sand (about 400 racers)
• “On your mark, get set…DASH!”  Everyone grabs the hand of the one next to them and crashes into the cold icy water, splashing, cheering, whooping and flailing about
• once out there, Tess floats and looks at the stars and in the breeze, she could hear the farewell tinkling of the chimes…

And of course there was love (really, always? I like books and movies to portray women as independent and not always end the stories with LOVE and couples walking off into the sunset…but that’s a discussion for another time).

Here’s an example of one of the many real mermaid festivals and parades that take place around the country (I really want to go to one some day):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDw4–5is0c