Mermaid Spotting in BETWEEN THE LINES by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer

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In Case You Missed It: In April, I was lucky enough to interview Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer for Fairy Tale Fortnight!  I also reviewed this fabulous book.

The finished copy of Jodi Picoult's first foray into YA (and fantasy, at that!) literature alongside her teenage daughter, Samantha van Leer, is breathtakingly stunning.  Even though I was lucky enough to snag an ARC, nothing prepared me for the way the final copy would look.

For one thing, it's in full-on color.  I knew that the color would alternate between Delilah's and Oliver's respective POVs, but I wasn't expecting to see additional color applied to the story narrative, nor was I expecting to see the illustrations by Yvonne Gilbert and Scott M. Fischer to be in full-blown cover.

The interior design is so lovely that I had to do a vlog so you could see the book's shininess for yourself.  This is one book that I would never want to own on an e-reader (even a color model) because the physical copy is so well-packaged.

YouTube Link

Whether or not you normally read books by Picoult, BETWEEN THE LINES is different enough from anything else she's written that it's worth taking another chance on this wonderful author.

Plus, there are MERMAIDS.  It's worth it just for the mermaids.  In the storybook part of BETWEEN THE LINES, the mermaids are evil sirens, described as:

HER SKIN WAS BLUE, PATTERNED WITH A WEB OF SCALES.  Her hair was a wild black cloud, seaweed twisted into its crown, flowing behind translucent, spiny ears.  Two sets of gills undulated on her cheeks and beneath her emaciated rib cage, which tapered into a muscular, finned tail that reflected flashes of copper and gold.  She had no bridge to her nose, just deep-set nostrils that flared above the cavern of her toothless smile.

(Page 76, US hardcover edition)

In reality, when the storybook's pages are closed, the mermaids are actually, as Delilah observes, "hard-core feminists."  The mermaids have completely different personalities compared to the way they're described in the storybook.

One of my favorite dialogues from BETWEEN THE LINES is spoken by a mermaid:

"WHAT MAKES A TREASURE A TREASURE," Marina replied, "is how rare a find it is, when you need it the most."

(Page 82, US hardcover edition)

That fabulous rendition of three mermaids drowning Prince Oliver would make me pick up this book immediately if I hadn't already been a Jodi Picoult fan!  This is so far removed from her other novels that I think she'll gain a new following, and I think her daughter will as well.