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Donna Jo Napoli , David Wiesner

Fish Girl

YEAR: 2017

COUNTRY: United States of America

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Title of the work

Fish Girl

Country of the First Edition

Country/countries of popularity

United States, Worldwide

Original Language

English

First Edition Date

2017

First Edition Details

David Wiesner and Donna Jo Napoli, Fish Girl. New York: Clarion Books, 2017.

ISBN

9780547483931

Genre

Fantasy fiction
Graphic novels

Target Audience

Crossover

Cover

Missing cover

We are still trying to obtain permission for posting the original cover.


Author of the Entry:

Elizabeth Hale, University of New England, ehale@une.edu.au

Peer-reviewer of the Entry:

Hanna Paulouskaya, University of Warsaw, hannapa@al.uw.edu.pl

Miriam Riverlea, University of New England, mriverlea@gmail.com

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Leaf pattern
Leaf pattern

Title of the work

Fish Girl

Country of the First Edition

Country/countries of popularity

United States, Worldwide

Original Language

English

First Edition Date

2017

First Edition Details

David Wiesner and Donna Jo Napoli, Fish Girl. New York: Clarion Books, 2017.

ISBN

9780547483931

Genre

Fantasy fiction
Graphic novels

Target Audience

Crossover

Cover

Missing cover

We are still trying to obtain permission for posting the original cover.


Author of the Entry:

Elizabeth Hale, University of New England, ehale@une.edu.au

Peer-reviewer of the Entry:

Hanna Paulouskaya, University of Warsaw, hannapa@al.uw.edu.pl

Miriam Riverlea, University of New England, mriverlea@gmail.com

Female portrait

Donna Jo Napoli (Author)

Donna Jo Napoli (b. 1948) is an American children’s author and professor of Linguistics. She has a BA in Mathematics and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures, both from Harvard, and spent a postdoctoral year in Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has held visiting lectureships in a range of countries, including China, Australia, the UK, Russia and Switzerland, often using these stays in other countries to research her novels.  She lives outside Philadelphia and is married to a professor of Health Law; she has five children and seven grandchildren (donnajonapoli.com, accessed: August 7, 2018). Of Italian descent, she was raised Catholic but now considers herself an atheist (Crew 2010). As well as writing Treasury of Greek Mythology for National Geographicshe also wrote Treasury of Egyptian Mythology, Treasury of Norse Mythology and Tales from the Arabian Nights, all with Christina Balit as illustrator. 

She has run conferences on deaf issues and produced books intended for deaf children, in ASL/English, Fiji Sign Language, Brazilian Sign Language, German Sign Language, Irish Sign Language, Italian Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, Korean Sign Language and Nepali Sign Language. 

After one of her books was translated into Farsi, she spoke at an Iranian children’s literature festival. Her body of work includes poetry, environmental writing and writing on how to write for children. She lists Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood on her website as two of her favourite authors (donnajonapoli.com, accessed: August 7, 2018).

In 2010, Napoli was the subject of a book by Hilary S. Crew – Donna Jo Napoli: Writing with Passion. Crew defines central themes of Napoli’s work as ‘an unmasking of bigotry and hypocrisy; a belief in family and friendships; and the conviction that whatever terrible things happen in one’s life, there is a place from which to begin again’. 

Napoli states she writes about mythology, fairy tales and religion because they ‘deal with the very heart and soul of humanity’ (cited in Crew, 2010). She says on her website "I find most historical fairy tales really disturbing to work on. But I do love them all."


Bio prepared by Robin Diver, University of Birmingham, RSD253@student.bham.ac.uk


David Wiesner by Alvintrusty. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (accessed: December 27, 2021).

David Wiesner (Illustrator)

David Wiesner was born in New Jersey, and is an American illustrator and writer and children’s books.  His work is well known and well regarded, including Caldecott Medal-winners: Tuesday (1992), The Three Pigs (2002), and Flotsam (2007).Wiesner is known for his experimentation with form in visual storytelling (see The Three Pigs, in which the pigs of the well-known folk story burst out of the picture’s frame, and into a new, surreal storyline).  In developing Flotsam, he collaborated with leading scholar of transmedia storytelling, Henry Jenkins.  


Bio prepared by Elizabeth Hale, University of New England, ehale@une.edu.au


Translation

French: Fish Girl, adapt. Julia and Simon Segal, le Genévrier [La Garenne-Colombes], 2017.

Summary

Fish Girl is the story of a mermaid who was kidnapped as a baby by a fisherman who found her in his catch. Seeing financial opportunity, he set up a seaside attraction in an old house, calling it ‘Ocean Wonders,’ posing as Neptune, the ‘god of seas and storms,’ and charging visitors $2 to ‘see the mysterious fish girl.’ The mermaid is captive in a large tank, which she shares with fish and an octopus, and which is decorated like a girl’s bedroom. The mermaid’s job is to play hide-and-seek with visitors, who try to see her in her tank, and to collect the pennies they have thrown into the tank. She has reached adolescence, and her best friend is a red octopus.  When the fisherman advertises a new T-shirt, the mermaid goes into the public tank to see it, and is spotted by a girl her own age, Livia. This is the encounter that precipitates the mermaid’s curiosity about the world. She is lonely in her tank, at the mercy of the fisherman, who threatens her that if she is revealed, ‘scientists will take you to a lab. You’ll be a specimen. They’ll cut you open.’ (22), and who tells her a tale that humans had destroyed her mer-people family, and that he (posing as Neptune) had rescued her: ‘I hid you.Baby you. I held you in my arms. Remember?’ (25) Nevertheless, the mermaid wonders what it would be like to be human. At night, she sneaks out of the tank, and as she does so discovers that the touch of air turns her tail to legs. In the fisherman’s office she discovers the truth, and her desire to escape grows. One evening she sneaks out to the funfair, and on her return discovers the fish in her tank no longer recognise her. Livia visits her and the two girls swim together in the tank.  Livia names the mermaid, Mira. The fisherman comes upon them, bursts into a rage and makes Livia leave. Mira’s octopus friend restrains him, and a suddenly stormy ocean spills into the building, breaking the windows, releasing the fish, and the mermaid and her friend. (Nature, or perhaps the real Neptune, have freed her?) The sea could keep Mira, but sends her ‘home’ to the beach, where she says goodbye to her octopus friend. In the aftermath of the storm, Mira walks on the beach. She sees the fisherman speaking to the authorities – he sees her and keeps silent (revealing her existence would get him in more trouble than it would her). Mira walks on, and finds Livia on the beach with her mother. There she speaks her first word: ‘Livia.’ The girls embrace, and Mira goes home with her friend.  

Analysis

Fish Girl is a moving take on traditional mermaid narratives, drawing on themes from Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid story, and from ideas about the role of Neptune as powerful king of the ocean. It is also a reflection on power, identity, coming of age, and friendship. Mira’s story has much in common with contemporary novels about abduction and entrapment (see for instance, Emma Donoghue’s Room). Mira’s silence, like the traditional voice-less mermaid of Andersen’s story, emphasizes her powerlessness and entrapment – the moment at the end when Mira speaks offers a release of pent-up emotion, and her transition from isolated entrapment to agency in a loving family. The fisherman uses the myth of Neptune to emphasize his power, to play to an audience used to attending fantasy-oriented sea-side and fun-fair attractions.  

Fish Girl is somewhat experimental for Wiesner and Napoli: for both it is a first foray into graphic novel storytelling. Wiesner’s use of colour is evocative – the blues, and greens of Mira’s world, and the bright contrast of the orange octopus who is for a long time Mira’s only friend make for a lush reading experience, and emphasize both the beauty and the loneliness and pain of Mira’s predicament. (The colour scheme is also reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of the Little Mermaid myth, Ponyo). The storytelling is a little stilted in places, perhaps because so much of it is filtered through Mira’s thoughts; however the emotional effect is to highlight her loneliness further.  

While mermaids are not exclusively classical, and Mira is not presented as a classical siren, the fisherman’s self-titled role as Neptune offers an insight into the ways that mermaid lore is classicised, sometimes in tawdry fashion. Fish Girl has an optimistic ending in that Mira is free to join Livia’s family, though perhaps it is sad that Mira gives up her mermaid identity in order to join a human family; overall it is a sad reflection on the trauma located within many a mermaid myth.  


Further Reading

Evelyn Arizpe and McAdam, Julie, “Crossing Visual Borders and Connecting Cultures: Children's Responses to the Photographic Theme in David Wiesner's Flotsam”, New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 17:2 (2011): 227–243.

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