When We Believed in Mermaids

Book club selection. This is not something I would have ever known existed were it not for book club, and while enjoy is a strong word (there's a whole mess of rough stuff in this story, see trigger warnings below) I found myself fully engaged in a book I was prepared to write off from page 1. And I ended up really liking the book overall, except for maybe the last chapter. (But that's a me thing - I would argue it wrapped up either too neatly or too quickly.)

Also, timeline. This book was published in 2019 and presumably takes place in the same general time frame, and presumably one of our main characters, Josie/Mari was able to successfully take on/discard two different identities during the previous 15 years while everyone (admittedly not many people) assumed that she had been killed in a train explosion in Europe. And I'm giving it a little bit of a side-eye that in 2004-ish you could take the passport off one of your fellow dead passengers and pass it off as your own, and continue to get away with all the legal documentation for 15 years (which she would have had to do, as she got married, acquired property, etc.). SIDE EYE. But story reasons. Okay, sure.

But also, you can hate your former self but that doesn't mean you have to figuratively kill yourself off to start over. Like, she could have moved to New Zealand, detoxed, did all the same things, and still let her mom and sister know that she was, you know, not dead in the train accident. Even if she never wanted to see them again.

Again, complicated story, but yeah I still liked it and thought it was overall successful and surprisingly will make for a good discussion. 3.5 stars

TW: child neglect, child sexual abuse (molestation, rape), child physical abuse (off-page), alcoholism, suicide, drug addiction, abortion, fatphobia