This is a beautifully told story that I struggled through. I’m not sure who I would recommend it to except an adult. An innocent young girl who has “seal” in her grows up on a remote island where her family and the town’s people taunt, tease and neglect her. As she grows up her only joy is in the “seal” power that she discovers within. One evening she takes a seal, temporarily turned man, as her lover and has a child who doesn’t thrive on land. The tiny boy must be returned to the sea in order to survive. The child remains a secret and she grieves alone. She becomes, or is called, “the witch” and devises a cruel plan to exact revenge. She can call beautiful women from seals who bond with the first person they see. By charging men a fortune for seal wives she manages to destroy marriages and families on the island until seal wives are the only remaining women. The seal wives are irresistibly beautiful and make loving wives and mothers but they are always sad and depressed away from the sea. Finally, there is a child who decides he must stop the sadness and figures out how to collect the skins of the mothers and send them back to the sea. He must sacrifice a great deal but does it out of love for his mother. Meanwhile the “witch” has grown old and tired of the revenge which has also made her rich. At her death we discover that she’d had three baby boys, all of whom had to be returned to the sea. There is heartbreak for the “witch” who began as an innocent child but is there redemption? Isolation, hopelessness, and too much cruelty for me.
August 31, 2017