A Mermaid's Tale

Now that the semester has ended, and my pile of marking is out of the way, I can finally give some thought to Christmas, which is just around the corner. We're having a Ross family Christmas this year, so I thought it would be nice to make a gift edition of an incomplete fantasy novel written by Jack's late sister Anne. The story is about a super intelligent and strong-willed mermaid called Poinsettia, who rebels against the strictures imposed upon women in the high-walled underwater kingdom where she lives. 

The drawing above is from one of Anne's sketchbooks. It is certainly a mermaid, although she is somewhat more attractive than the Poinsettia described in Anne's novel, who is constantly mocked for her long nose and plain appearance by the nasty band of young mermaids she has grown up with.

Anne completed ten chapters of the novel, which were handwritten on the pages of a 1974 diary. It is certainly a remarkable and accomplished piece of fiction, and hard to believe that it is the work of a teenage girl. However, as you will know from the previous posts I've written about Anne, she had a brilliant creative mind. Even though she never finished the novel, leaving off at a point where Poinsettia has just made her bold escape, the text as it stands is certainly deserving of publication. I'm sure that the few family members and friends who receive a copy for Christmas will appreciate Anne's story as much as I do. 

I plan to include a few of Anne's illustrations in the publication. While I'm not certain that they relate directly to her Mermaid story, they come from the same sketchbook with the Mermaid image in it, so they will make a nice accompaniment to the text.

If you click on Anne's name in the labels below this post you can see some of her other works that I've written about on this blog.