From the mind of Laurie Brooks comes a magical tale about acceptance and belonging with Selkie Girl, a young adult book that draws inspiration from the Scottish myths of the selkie people, seals who can transform into humans by shedding their skins.
Not Like Other Girls
For Elin Jean, the sea has always held a strange lure. Taunted by the island children, who call her "Selkie Girl" because of her webbed hands, she finds herself constantly going to the sea to play with the seals with whom she feels a strong kinship. Even her love for her grandfather and growing attraction to the gypsy boy Tam McCodrun can't stop her from feeling she doesn't truly belong with the people on the Orkney Islands.
Then one day Elin Jean hears strange voices that lead her to a drawer in her home that hides a selkie pelt. To her amazement, she learns the pelt belongs to her mother, a selkie who has been trapped in human form since Elin Jean's selfish father stole her pelt years ago.
Discovering the Selkie Folk
But when Elin Jean returns the pelt to her mother, she is crushed when her mother transforms into a seal and swims away. Following her into the sea, Elin Jean magically becomes into a selkie herself -- yet one with human fingers that mark her as an outsider to the selkies who adopt Elin Jean into their clan and inform her of a prophecy foretelling of a child born of land and sea with the ability to save the selkies.
Unwilling to believe she is “the one foretold”, Elin Jean still decides to stay with the selkies and find the knowin’ – the selkie word for a better understanding of oneself and one’s place in the world. Yet even after months of studying with her teacher Arnfin and the Arl Teller, the selkies’ matriarch, Elin Jean is still ostracized by the younger selkies, making her wonder where she truly belongs, the land or the sea.
But when Elin Jean’s father begins slaughtering seals in a vengeful attempt to punish his wife for leaving him, the Selkie Girl realizes she must protect her adopted family. As her father joins the islanders in the cull, a traditional practice where men kill baby seals to thin the population, Elin Jean joins the selkies on their annual birthing journey to the beach where she must make peace not only with her own mixed heritage, but also between the humans and selkies.
From Play Production to Novel
Based on her award-winning stage play Between the Land and the Sea: A Selkie Myth, Laurie Brooks’ first book Selkie Girl reads simultaneously like a timeless legend and a contemporary young adult book. Elin Jean’s struggle to find her place in the world will resonate with anyone who’s had problems dealing with a mixed heritage or feelings of alienation – in short, anyone who’s been a teenager.
While Brooks researched the Scottish myths of the selkies extensively to write her stage play and young adult book, she doesn’t hesitate to put her own twist on the legends. Where most selkie myths end with the mother abandoning her children after regaining her true form, Brooks lets the selkie’s child follow her mother and try to find a place of true belonging. This twist gives the book a hopeful theme encouraging the reader to discover, as Elin Jean does, that “Belonging’s not a place. It’s inside you.”
Learn more about the stage play Selkie Girl was based on at From Stage Play to Young Adult Novel and read about Laurie Brooks' playwriting career at Playwright Shares Thoughts on Theatre.
Brooks, Laurie. Selkie Girl. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-375-85170-4
Visit Laurie Brooks’ website
Like new interpretations of myths and fairy tales? Read this review of Rapunzel's Revenge
 |
