A 10-year-old girl speaks openly to the sea in this stunning translation from the Spanish by Lourdes Heuer (author of Esme's Birthday Conga Line) of Secrets We Tell the Sea, the Mexican award-winning middle-grade novel by Martha Riva Palacio Obón (Buenas noches, Laika). It is an exquisite portrait of friendship, loss, healing, and the untamable forces of childhood inquisitiveness, individuality, and insightfulness.
Sofía knows everyone was a mermaid before birth--that's why she's always spoken to the sea, though they've never met. They finally do when Sofía is sent by her mom to live in the coastal town of Bahía where her mom's boyfriend can no longer look at or touch Sofía like a barracuda. But she must instead live with "a full-blown sea dragon" (her grandmother) and face "the nightmare that is switching schools." In class, she meets Luisa, who has "something aquatic about her," with skin "spotted like a jaguar's" due to vitiligo, and who asks strange questions like "Do you speak submarine?" Just like that, Sofía is friends with another mermaid, their bond unbreakable as they swim all day, "comparing whose hands had wrinkled more," speaking to the sea through Luisa's spotted conch "shellphone," and reading science texts. Then the sea betrays Sofía, and she stops talking to it. She finds herself at war, her grief manifesting as storms, typhoons, and hurricanes, and she doesn't know how to stop it.
This profound work of magical realism overlays a girl's real world with the splendors and perils of the sea. Sofía, through Obón's shimmering prose, adopts an oceanic outlook on life: "plastic bags trapped in airstreams" are "floating jellyfish," her judgmental classmates "packed sardines," her myriad emotions "swarming crabs." To her, the sea smells like "swallowing the whole sun through your nose" and the sound in a seashell is "a humpback whale's song as it guides its pod through algae pastures and phosphorescent plankton clouds." Her probing questions ("What was stopping [the barracuda] from biting her mother?") and striking musings ("Perhaps we all sometimes feel like the last of our kind") tie to that with which she struggles: her mother's choices, her own tendency to stand out as strange. The third-person point of view occasionally dips into other characters' minds with grace, maintaining nautical metaphors to keep the story's mesmerizing spell alive. Secrets We Tell the Sea is a resplendent portrayal of the power of perspective. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer
Shelf Talker: An admirably steadfast 10-year-old girl who views her world via oceanic metaphors copes with loss in this joyous and achingly sorrowful middle-grade novel about the power of perspective.