Hélène Boudreau

I love mermaids, and I love stories about young girls not being all that okay with growing up - and I absolutely adore stories that deal with all the strange as fuck changes happening in young girls’ bodies at that horrible age of 14 (*cough* periods *cough*) - so it would have been nearly impossible for me not to enjoy ‘Real Mermaids Don’t Wear Toe Rings’.

Jade, our soon-to-be-finny protagonist, is fourteen years old and preparing to go into the water for the first time since her mother drowned on a boat cruise. Honestly, she’d rather not, but her best friend in the world is having a birthday pool party, and there is simply no way for Jade to refuse. But when the two girls go shopping for a new bathing suit for Jade (who has a pretty hard time finding any due to her pudgy figure), a label with her mother’s name on it throws Jade into emotional turmoil - but not nearly half as much as her first period, which just happens to come at that precise moment in the fitting room. And when she’s managed to get out of there (with a bloody bikini bottom and napkins shoved into her panties), to find some pads at the drugstore with the assistance of her dad, she runs right into the boy who gave her the most awful nickname of her childhood, but who also turned surprisingly cute in the year he was gone - and who then promptly gets confronted with Jade’s father yelling something about maxi pads. Talk about ‘when it rains’, huh!

But it’s not like that’s the worst part of Jade’s day. Jade gets home and takes a relaxing bath with Epsom salt, falls asleep in her tub - and wakes up with a tail! A real, huge, flapping, finny mermaid tail!

And that’s how all the hassle starts. In her quest to find out what the hillie is wrong with her, Jade has to navigate through lies she told years ago, painful transformation into a mermaid and back into her human form, middle school rivalry and something that might be first love - and of course, she has to find out what is going on in Port Toulouse. And the longer Jade has to live with her finny little secret, the more clear it seems to become that she isn’t the only one with secrets in her quiet lake-side home town…

The book is written from Jade’s first person point of view, and Hélène Boudreau just really nails that 14-year-old iffiness, the hormone-fuelled hurricane of feelings of any eighth-grader, amplified with an outright dysphoric alienation with one’s own body which is likely bound to happen when you wake up with a huge tailfin that burns like lava when it turns back into legs. Boudreau’s descriptions here absolutely got under my skin - the process of changing to a mermaid and back is raw, ripping, and savagely draining. It’s also scary as hell - or how would you feel if you had to basically drown yourself in order to change your lower half from skin to fin?

But even despite this rather grim and grimy take on magical mermaid metamorphosis, Real Mermaids Don’t Wear Toe Rings is an honestly heartwarming story about friendship, family and identity. It’s nearly painful to watch Jade fight with the lies she has to tell to her best friend in order to keep herself from becoming a fishy guinea pig in some sort of genetics laboratory, how their friendship, one of the most important things in the world for Jade (even more so after her mother’s death), nearly succumbs to this invisible wall between them. I love how her relationship with her best friend is front and center at the part of Jade’s life that’s got nothing to do with fins and water and Epsom salt, and not her budding crush for amateur sailor Luke. Female friendships are incredibly important to me, especially in middle school books, and it’s really nice to see that first love doesn’t have to always play the first fiddle.

Real Mermaids Don’t Wear Toenails is the first part of a series, and I’m really glad for this; Boudreau’s world is populated with fascinating characters and full of interesting, potential future plot threads, and even though the world of Port Toulouse is rather small at the moment, I really hope that it will be properly expanded and build upon in the rest of this series.

This book left quite a load of questions unanswered - and, to say the truth, some plot points appeared to be a little bit rushed. But since there are 4 other books out there (and the second book of the series is already on my kindle), I hope that those questions will - eventually - be answered.

In general I’d recommend this book for younger readers and people who feel young at heart ;) One thing that’s important to consider is that this book is written in a language that makes heavy use of teenage lingo - a detail I personally loved, but which might not be for everybody.

(PS: This book also contains one of the BEST chocolate mug cake recipes ever.)… (més)