Can a Mermaid Teach You Something True?

3 Jun

Written by Lou Nylander

Our Book Club Divided the Room. Here's My Take.

For our second Wildflowers book club, we read The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey. It divided us. I was on the side that loved it completely, and I'll tell you why.

The book, in brief

Set in the Caribbean in the 1970s, The Mermaid of Black Conch tells the story of Aycayia, an ancient mermaid captured by American sport fishermen and rescued by David, a local man who nurses her back to health as she transforms from sea creature to woman. It's part myth, part love story, part reckoning with colonial history and the ownership of bodies. Monique Roffey won the Costa Novel Award for it in 2020, and the novel is rooted in real indigenous Caribbean mythology.

It's under 300 pages. It will stay with you much longer than that.

What we talked about

Can a book earn its most disturbing scenes? The opening is brutal. The men who haul Aycayia onto their boat dehumanise her immediately. The act of urination as possession. It was shocking, and our group was split on whether that was a strength or a flaw. I think it's a strength. Roffey is naming something true about how ownership is performed, how bodies, particularly women's bodies, get claimed before anyone asks permission. Lucie brought critical context that shifted the whole conversation: Roffey wrote this novel deliberately to rewrite an old indigenous Caribbean myth and give Aycayia the rite of passage the original denied her. Romantic love. Erotic love. A story of her own. Once you hold that frame, the brutality at the start becomes essential. It's what she's being rescued from.

What does it really mean to nurture someone? David starts this book immature and unmoored. He needs Aycayia as much as she needs him. She gives him routine, purpose, a reason to show up. That dependency is the emotional engine of the novel, and Roffey doesn't let it off the hook easily. David's desire to possess Aycayia, even to marry her, mirrors the very behaviours he rescued her from. Lucie noted the repetition in some of the layered voices and diary entries, and that's a fair observation. But I found those layers showed you exactly where each character was in their journey, and how far they still had to travel.

Why is this mermaid so different? Roffey's Aycayia smells of fish. She has pointed teeth and tattoos. She is not a Disney fantasy, and that matters. Her arrival forces the whole community to reassess their lives. Reggie finds unexpected purpose teaching her sign language. A deaf character experiences music entirely through vibration. The 1970s setting is doing real work too: it echoes a moment when Caribbean communities were actively reclaiming their identities and heritage after centuries of colonial erasure. The mermaid's transformation is never tidy. That's the point.

What do we do with an ambiguous ending? We spent a good ten minutes debating what the hurricane meant. I loved that. Roffey allows you to build your own conclusion. Aycayia gets her freedom. David carries his loss. The cost is real. A tidy resolution would have betrayed everything the novel had built.

Why it matters for Wildflowers

This book is about what it costs to be claimed, and what it takes to reclaim yourself. It's about the people who nurture us back to wholeness, and what we owe them. It's about the stories that were written about us before we could write our own.

That felt like a Wildflowers conversation to me.

The next book club is coming. Watch this space.

Lx

Image: @piersgreatperhaps — Pier Nirandara