Mermaid Dreams

Neat, clean illustrations made using gouache, colored pencil, and digital assembly use deep colors, soft shapes, and ample space to create playful scenes that are pleasing to the eye and comfortably childlike. A cute and simple story about making friends.

At the beach, where "the air smells fresh and salty," a shy child named Maya falls asleep. As she dreams, she rides on her green turtle floaty, diving beneath the waves, "Maya slides off her turtle and realizes she can swim just like the other ocean dwellers." She's become a mermaid with a blue tail that comes up snug around her chest. Pugsley illustrates in a naïf style: Maya has almost doll-like features, while underwater flora and fauna—wavy green sea plants, speckled corals, and a deep red octopus—are rendered in thick, painterly shapes. Maya's eventual meeting with a fellow mermaid leads to her making a friend above water—a child named Pearl (" 'Let's pretend we're mermaids, ' whispers Pearl"). A dreamy beach day outing.

Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

Maya simply loves the beach and eagerly awaits time to play with her parents. With bucket and shovel in hand, she asks them to play, but her parents want a moment to relax. Shy Maya is reluctant to search for new friends on her own but slowly closes her eyes and drifts into a dream-filled sleep where a brightly pattered underwater world of gouache and colored pencil images fills her vision with animals and sea plants. She has become a mermaid with a beautiful blue tail and searches the deep for the origin of sounds that call to her with the voice of a friend. What at first appears to be another mermaid turns out to be a new friend and together their imaginations swim freely. Text includes dialogue and a bit of page-to-page inference within a predicable simple narration, while underwater scenes contain the bright colors of sea animals and corals. VERDICT A seasonal selection where mermaids are in high demand.-Mary Elam, Learning Media Services, Plano ISD, TX

Copyright 2019 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Pugsley's use of watercolour for the illustrations is a beautiful addition to Maya's dream-like fantasy world [and she] also cleverly uses varying depths of field to illustrate Maya's feelings of loneliness and isolation in the beginning of the story compared to the end. —CM Magazine

"Mermaid Dreams invites children to test the waters of independence from parents, and reassures them that they are not alone in this quest. Using the language of a child's dream world and the shapes and colors of their own crayon box perspective, Kate Pugsley adds a new vibrancy to the enduring mermaid myth." —Imaginary Elevators