MERMAID MOON by Susann Cokal Official Blog Tour with Author guest post & #giveaway @EJBookPromos @CokalSusann @TTCBooksandmore ~ '

Hardcover: 496 pages

Publisher: Candlewick (March 3, 2020)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1536209597

ISBN-13: 978-1536209594

Praise for MERMAID MOON

“Susann Cokal’s latest miracle, Mermaid Moon, springs from the tides where Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid once swam — and walked to land. But she delivers something even more rich and strange, and a mermaid heroine who will swim away with your heart.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Egg & Spoon

“Cokal's moody and sea-drenched tale weaves touches of Hans Christian Andersen with a dash of Pied Piper, using language that gorgeously sets each scene, including the exceedingly creepy bone vault … Lyrical, complex, and occasionally dark.” —School Library Journal

“Cokal creates a well-developed matriarchal mermaid mythology in which women couple, bonded by love and respect, and men are largely unnecessary. Through several voices and richly detailed prose, these markedly different worlds overlap and diverge to impart a nuanced exploration of power, family, faith, and love.” —Publishers Weekly

“Mermaid Moon is an action-packed tale of parental abandonment, familial longing, treachery and dark magic with an appealingly determined heroine.” —BookPage

“A beautifully told, immersive story that layers fairy-tale elements with more modern themes, allowing for a different experience with every reread.” —Shelf Awareness

In the far northern reaches of civilization, a mermaid leaves the sea to look for her land-dwelling mother among people as desperate for magic and miracles as they are for life and love.

Blood calls to blood; charm calls to charm.

It is the way of the world.

Come close and tell us your dreams.

—The Mermaids

Sanna has been living as a mermaid — but she is only half seavish. The night of her birth, a sea-witch cast a spell that made Sanna’s people, including her landish mother, forget how and where she was born.

Now Sanna is sixteen and an outsider in the seavish flok where women rule and mothers mean everything. She is determined to go to land and learn who she is. So she apprentices herself to the ancient witch, Sjældent, to learn the magic of making and unmaking. With a new pair of legs and a mysterious quest to complete for her teacher, she follows a clue that leads her ashore on the Thirty-Seven Dark Islands.

Her fellow mermaids wait floating on the seaskin as Sanna stumbles into a wall of white roses thirsty for blood, a hardscrabble people hungry for miracles, and a baroness of fading beauty who will do anything to live forever, even at the expense of her own children.

From the author of the Michael L. Printz Honor Book The Kingdom of Little Wounds comes a gorgeously told tale of belonging, sacrifice, fear, hope, and mortality.

You can purchase Mermaid Moon at the following Retailers:

Author guest post... Ten favorite guy/girl characters from your books, including random facts about them.

1. Baroness Thyrla from Mermaid Moon: On the walls of her bedchamber, she has mounted bones of the people from whom she’s sucked years of life in order to stay young and beautiful forever. Some of those bones are her own children. Right now she’s my favorite of my villains. Random fact: Although I made up her name, its origins are in old Scandinavian words for thunder.

2. Sanna from Mermaid Moon: I think she might be the toughest girl character I’ve ever written, because she’s determined not to let her body limit her—whether it has a tail or a pair of legs. Fact: I got her name from the sound of water hissing through the sand as a wave receded. (I am a beach lover.)

3. Midi Sorte from The Kingdom of Little Wounds: Or maybe the tough-girl crown goes to Midi. She has survived the most. Raised in a palace where her best friend is a woman called Poison-Auntie; captured around age thirteen and transported to a northern kingdom, enslaved, violated, with her tongue sliced so she can’t speak about what’s been done to her. Random fact: She doesn’t know if she’s African, Asian, or just Greek; no one has ever told her where she’s from, and she doesn’t have a word for it. This could have been true of a sheltered girl stolen away from her home in the 1500s.

4. Ava Bingen from The Kingdom of Little Wounds: After being disgraced over a love affair, she uses what she has—which at first is just an ability to sew beautifully—to make herself a new life working in the palace for mad Queen Isabel. Fun fact: The Bingen comes from Hildegard von Bingen, my favorite medieval mystic, who wrote music to which I listen as I write.

5. Sjældent, the sea-witch from Mermaid Moon: Itches and itches from the barnacles and crabs living under the scales of her tail and around the flaps of her decaying flesh. Longs for something she cannot name. Random fact: Reminds me of myself.

[photo: I commissioned this artist’s model of a dead mermaid to be made with locks of my hair, then I made a nice environment in which she could sit. It was my birthday.]

6. Famke Sommerfugl from Breath and Bones: A sixteen-year-old artist’s model from Denmark with a nasty case of tuberculosis, she manages to get herself to America in the 1880s for the long, fatal love chase of a very mediocre painter. Historical fact: Electrical stimulation was in fact historically considered a possible cure for everything that was wrong with a woman, including tuberculosis and unrequited love.

7. Lord Nicolas Bullen, villain from The Kingdom: My favorite scene in this book is one in which Nicolas is angry because the king has just died and Nicolas’s plan for grabbing power through him is now ruined. He takes a rowboat out to the bay beyond the palace and rows around in circles, fuming. When I get stuck on a plot point for a story, I think about Nicolas spinning like a water beetle. Secret fact: He looks like an old boyfriend, but they don’t have much else in common.

8. Tomas from Mermaid Moon: Tomas is my nicest character ever, and he was the most stubborn one to wrestle onto paper. Personal fact: It’s harder to do nice characters than mean ones—you still want them to have some grit, not to live like namby-pamby Little Lord Fauntleroys.

9. Bonne Tardieu from Mirabilis: My first published heroine and forever close to my heart. She’s in love with an impossible person (the pregnant woman who employs her as a wet nurse), but she doesn’t lose her kindness. Heart-melting fact: My aunt liked Bonne so much that she named her cat Mirabilis.

10. Old Olla from Mermaid Moon: She takes care of bees and although (or because) she has trouble with her memory, she always believes in the good in people. Artsy fact: I figured out her character while I was building a dollhouse with stone walls and a thatched roof. I needed somebody to live in it, and that person turned out to be Olla. And Olla was the key to my plot problems. -->

Photo Content from Susann Cokal

Susann Cokal is a moody historical novelist, a pop-culture essayist, book critic, magazine editor, and sometime professor of creative writing and modern literature. She lives in a creepy old farmhouse in Richmond, Virginia, with seven cats, a dog, a spouse, and some peacocks that supposedly belong to a neighbor. She is the author of two books for young adults and two for regular adults.

Susann's previous book, The Kingdom of Little Wounds, received several national awards, including a silver medal from the American Library Association's Michael L. Printz Award series. It also got starred reviews in Kirkus, School Library Journal, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and Publishers Weekly, and praise from Booklist, The New York Times Boook Review, and other venues. It was #3 on the Boston Globe list of best YAs of the 2013 and won an ALAN citation from the National Council of Teachers of English.

WEBSITE: https://www.susanncokal.net/

TWITTER: @CokalSusann

GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/321391.Susann_Cokal

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