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Loading... Sirenaby Donna Jo Napoli
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. arthos | Nov 15, 2008 |   210/210 Sirena is a book about a mermaid who lives with her sisters, their life goal is to fall in love with a human, so they can become immortal. One day that changes her life, a ship of sailors come to their island and blame them for their shipwreck, and Sirena feels guilty so she swims to the island of lemnos. once she's there, a young sailor is thrown overboard with a snake bite, she tends for him and after a while they fall in love. Each day they live together helping each other through their struggles. In the end he has to make a big decision that changes their life together. The main character, Sirena is at first a part of her sisters "school" but once she gets on her own she learns about herself, and the qualities of immortality. I don't think this book was very relate able because I'm not a mermaid and I don't have to deal with immortality. I think anybody can relate to this book if they have to deal with the struggles of love and differences between others. nharbert | Dec 17, 2007 | Sirena is a Siren, who, in Napoli's work, are mermaids; the offspring of the rape of a parrot-fish by Eros (no, really), they cannot be immortal unless they have a man fall in love with them. Yeah. So Sirena, unlike the rest of her sisters, doesn't want to trick a man into loving her by her singing (shades of the Little Mermaid, oh my), and runs off to Lemnos, where she meets Philoctetes. You could probably fill in the rest, too. Not a *bad* book, but it mostly was a supposed-to-be-titillating, I think, meditation on a young "girl" discovering sexuality, and really, YA books *can* be about something else! The constant discussions of sex, though not graphic, offended me a whole lot more than the graphic scenes in either An Arrow's Flight or Cook's Achilles. I think it's this sort of nonsense that ought to be kept out of the hands of teenagers, not to mention its ridiculous romanticism of Love. Bah! (  )lysimache | Jul 6, 2007 | I disliked this book very much. It is written in present tense (ew) and I really didn't like it. The story is about a mermaid...and she falls in love with a man. (  )Nymphadora | Feb 11, 2006 | 0.043 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0590383884, Hardcover)Donna Jo Napoli thoughtfully and poetically reexamined the story of Hansel and Gretel from the witch's point of view in The Magic Circle. Here, she retells the Greek myth of the Sirens, whose sweet, beckoning singing caused countless shipwrecks. But did the Sirens (who Napoli imagines as mermaids) really mean for the sailors to perish? Or were these sultry singers cursed themselves? In Napoli's tale, because they are half-human, the 10 Sirens are doomed to lead short mortal lives--unless they can convince men to become their mates. But after witnessing a shipwreck in which the survivors kill one of her sisters, 17-year-old Sirena decides she would rather lose her chance at eternal life than trick a human into loving her. She vows to live alone on "an island where the first rays of sun bring sight to blind eyes.... I am going there to find new sight. I will wipe from my brain the sights I have seen and start over." Little does she know that due to a jealous goddess, a sea-serpent bite, and a dead hero, a man will come to her island and love her for herself, not just her song. Sirena is the perfect teenage heroine--questioning authority and falling in love no matter what the consequences. In creating this beautiful story, Napoli brings mythology alive for today's young adults. (Ages 12 to 15) --Jennifer Hubert(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:25 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I was not terribly fond of the writing style - spare and plain, even terse. But one gets accustomed to it. It draws richly on Greek mythology, without lapsing into impersonality. I found the story moving, and much more satisfying than Andersen's "Little Mermaid", which I remember as one of the most distressing stories I read as a child.