Vonda N. McIntyre (1948–2019)

This is the kind of book, that in the wrong hands could have been a very boring and uninteresting read. Writing about Versailles and court life is hard to make interesting. I feel like if you are not entirely familiar with the historical context and the intricacies of court politics that some interactions might not read very well, but if you are familiar, the balancing act of emotionally affecting character work with real history is incredibly impressive. This book follows the exploits of a naive girl, Marie-Josephe, who comes to the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV to visit her brother, Yves from the French colony of Martinique. Yves is a Jesuit Priest, who has captured a mermaid for the Sun King. Why does the Sun King want or need a mermaid? He is dying, and he thinks eating the mermaid will be the key to gaining immortality. Everyone assumes that the mermaid is an unthinking beast, but Marie-Josephe realizes that her brother has committed a grave mistake, that the mermaid can understand and talk to her with song. One of the things I think is kind of clever in this book is the idea of cages within cages. The Sun King famously kept the aristocracy under his thumb using the trappings of Versailles, just as the mermaid cannot escape its cage, just as many other characters including Marie-Josephe are trying to escape their respective cages.… (more)