Seal Child

Molly and her family have always spent long, lazy summers on Ambrose Island. There, Molly can watch for glimpses of the great gray seals that haunt the Maine shore or spend hours walking along the beach with her dog Clyde. But this year her vacation promises to be even more fun when she meets a girl named Meara. Molly and Meara are the same age, yet there's something about her new friend that makes Molly wonder who she is and where she came from. Nothing can prepare her for the strange truth . . . or for the dramatic event that's about to change their lives--and their friendship--forever.

Grade 5-6-- An involving first novel. Spending the Christmas vacation on an island in Maine with her parents and younger brother, Douglas, ten-year-old Molly hears the cries of a baby seal and finds the nightmarish body--skinned--of an adult seal on the beach. Not long after that, a girl comes to stay with Ruby, a widowed island woman whom Molly's family has known and loved for years. The girl, Meara, is loving, interested, and mysterious, and she eventually tells Molly that she is a seal, and that the dead seal was her mother. In the end, Meara sacrifices her time on land in order to save Molly's drowning dog, and she returns to the sea. Molly's conflicting emotions and needs are deeply felt, as is her love for the island. Characterization of the rest of the family and Ruby is sufficient if brief, but Douglas seems to change ages occasionally, being both too young and too old at times. Ruby's lost love and her connection with a bull seal who comes to console her in her grief is sketched in lightly, but adds a note of romance and mystery. Meara herself is fascinating yet somewhat ungrounded. Her desire to stay on land after her mother's death is surprising. By creating her own modern version of how selkies must make their choice between sea and land, establishing an arbitrary "once and once only," Peck intrigues readers but loses the power inherent in older legends of the seal people. Be that as it may, this is still a good story of friendship, love and loss, and the mysteries of the sea. --Sara Miller, Nassau Library System, NY
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