The Changeling Sea (1988)

I’ve tried reading The Tower at Stony Wood several times and have never gotten through it. I think I just had the wrong book, because this one was excellent. [Sept. 2008]

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The first McKillip book I ever read. I can see why I liked it and kept reading–there’s a lovely iridescence to this one and I really enjoy the way McKillip plays with different fairy tale motifs. Plus, I like the sea. [Jan. 2010] ( )

No one really knew where Peri lived the year after the sea took her father and cast his boat, shrouded in a tangle of fishing net, like an empty shell back onto the beach.

The Changeling Sea is short, straightforward (for McKillip) and exquisite. It reads like a fairytale - an unfamiliar, poignant and poetically written one. (I wouldn't be surprised if there is threads of an older, more traditional tale beneath this one.) There are princes, a magician, an innkeeper, the sea, a sea-monster, a quest for gold, romance, a tale of past sadness rising up to entangle with the present. But it is all muted by Peri's longing and grief - her father is dead, her mother inattentive, lost in her private grief, and her elderly mentor has disappeared. And so it is unbeknownst to anyone that she befriends the king's son, who longs for the sea.

The Changeling Sea is a tale to savour a sentence or two at a time (like McKillip's Ombria in Shadow), delighting in the language and the power of the words; a tale to dwell on. I love the way it captures being 15, still a bit innocent and not quite grown-up, and being lonely. (That resonated with me - and made me wish I had discovered this when I was 15 and lonely.) It is also about growing up when the realities of being grown-up seem sad and wild and beautiful, like the sea.

The sea, it seemed to Peri, had taken her mother as well as her father, and left some stranger wandering despairingly among her cooking pots. ( )

I have read a number of books by McKillip in the past and enjoyed them. This book was no exception; the writing is beautiful and creates wonderful imagery, the story has a fairy tale feel to it. I absolutely loved reading it.

Peri's father was lost to the sea last year and her mother is in a deep depression. Peri has taken to living in an old woman's abandoned house so that she doesn't have to face her mother's depression every day. One day Peri is so overcome by anger at the sea that she throws hexes into it and curses it. This ends up setting off a string of momentousness events. Now Peri finds herself drawn into the sad story of two princes and the curse that has affected them both.

Like all of McKillip's stories this one is beautifully written. There is excellent imagery and creative characters that are very engaging and make the story really come alive.

Peri is an intriguing character, she is a loner and angry at the sea. She sees things differently from those around her and this gives her an interesting perspective. The most intriguing character of the story was the magician that helps Peri deal with the two Princes. You can tell that the magician has a mysterious past and can do mysterious things. The two Princes are tough to relate to and kind of aloof because of the situations they are in, so they weren't my favorite.

The plot has a very fairy tale feel to it. The way that there are curses on the two Princes and the way kingdom beneath the sea is tied to the kingdom Peri lives in is classic fairy tale.

The story ends well and a bit ambiguously. As expected in a fairy tale story like this, not all ends happily but not all is horribly lost either.

Overall I really enjoyed the beautiful writing and description and was drawn to the eerie fairy tale feel of the story. I wish that the Kingdom Underneath the Sea had been expanded on some, I also wish we had gotten more of a chance to delve into the magician's past. Still given how slim this book is, it packs an engaging and magical story with surprising depth. I will definitely continue to read McKillip and look forward to reading other books that she has written. ( )

I was surprised by this book. I suppose its thinness and it's being billed as young adult made me lower my expectations a bit. But I'm on a mission to read all of McKillip's work, so I bought it this spring. This is a book of multiple troubled romances, including the romance of the sea. And this the first book of McKillips I've read in which I think she does romance well. As is common in McKillip's books (and fantasy in general), the young woman at the center of the book has magical power without realizing it. She ends up in the middle of an intersection of other powers. A powerful young mage arrives to solve what others see as the most obvious problem and ends up being the only one that sees all of the problems. I liked how his problem-solving involved a lot of guesswork. This strikes me as close to how problems, especially those on the edge of understanding, are actually solved. I also found his attempts to hint at his affection for the main character while she was awash in emotions for someone else quite charming. And that's how I would characterize the book overall: charming. Even the greed that grips the town seems more amusing than tragic. I'm sure I'll read it again some time when I feel like the world has lost its romance and I aim to put a smile. ( )

I just couldn't get past Peri loving a man who was so tormented, who gave her nothing in return--was incapable of giving her any of himself. But she was still in love with him & pined for him when he was gone. Just not my favorite message for the target audience. Save the angst for the older crowd--I prefer children's books when the girl falls for a boy who is actually nice to her and thinks of her and not just poor, poor him. ( )