Julian Is A Mermaid by Jessica Love

Julian Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s difficult to articulate feelings about a book that made you cry with its simple, quiet majesty, a book that now, every time you glance at it on your desk, makes you remember just how powerful story can be. Picture books are, I think, one of those spaces of the literary world where sometimes magic can be made in a way you do not quite understand but are so very grateful for it. Julian is a Mermaid is a dream, packed with magic in every achingly soft line and every gentle, soft note of love being acceptance and acceptance being love. Love. It’s maybe there that this book shines; Julian sees a mermaid at the pool, he wishes to be one, and I shall not spoil the payoff but I shall say that it is a payoff to hold to yourself like gold for a brief, beautiful moment, before sharing it with everybody that you know.

Julian Is A Mermaid is so quiet, so soft, so subtle, and yet so immense. It is a book about love. Julian is with his Nana; a woman built of curves and shape and lovely, lovely heart. The mermaids are three women he sees on the train. He wants to look as wonderful as they do. And, as the book progresses, he figures out how to do that.

This is a book about bodies so rarely depicted within picture books. We have this pearl-clutching fear, sometimes, that we must protect the children from something strange and indefinable without quite realising that we adults are the source of such fear. Children see the world in a particular way, and a good picture book embraces that. The world is strange, all of it, but it is also wonderful. Perfect. And bodies, sometimes, form part of that dialogue, shaped by gatekeepers more than the story, but Julian Is A Mermaid differs here. This book sings with bodies; beautiful, rich, wild bodies, all of them presented with this glorious sense of stillness and truth. They are what they are; they are so very wonderfully people living life in a culture of acceptability and love. The text is spare, beautiful, and the images are something rather wonderful: otherworldly, magical, and yet always within the grasp of a tiny child trying to realise his place in the world.

This is perfect, perfect stuff.



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