When a young girl who fears she is losing everything stands along the shore of Lake Michigan she senses a presence hidden beneath the waves. As her grandmother did before her, she has faith in her intuitions, and in a moment of despair is met by a mysterious healing power. This lovely series of poems, beautifully illustrated in quiet watercolors, tells a tale of grief and longing healed by grace.
~Patricia Hooper
The watercolor paintings throughout this book are a beautiful addition to the poems. They tell the story through dreamy, impressionistic images of lake, shore, and cottage, and watercolor—with its fluidity and its basis in water—is the perfect medium for these paintings. The Lake Michigan Mermaid is a moving book about a girl’s coming of age, about loss, and about learning to feel at home on earth.
~Vivian Wagner, NewPages.com
No matter how many times we reach for it, The Lake Michigan Mermaid continues to open us into a world where water is always speaking and implores us to listen to the many voices flowing through its currents. This important and timely work, lyrically told and lovingly illustrated, has been honored as a 2019 Michigan Notable Book.
~Mary Ladany, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry 2019
When a girl knows too much already about loss and longing but keeps her heart open, anything is possible. A beloved lake may reveal one of its great secrets. The girl may discover she's not as alone as she feared. Through poems written in two, alternating voices, The Lake Michigan Mermaid is a story that seems at once both classic and modern; it offers no fairy-tale ending, yet it captivates us with its mysteries, magic, and hope.
~Meg Kearney
An earthy, bittersweet fable, told in shimmering glimpses, of four hearts searching for connection — with each other, and with what is beyond their understanding. Oomen and Foster weave their magical tale out of beach grass and ribbon, out of sorrow and joy, out of water, sand, and ice.
~Lynne Rae Perkins
Deft storytellers, Foster and Oomen bring wit, empathy, and a precise eye for detail as they write of the rituals of family and the sorrows of the dispossessed. A richness of metaphors and a fascination with language pulse in work that deserves an enthusiastic audience.
~Colette Inez
Readers who love Franny Billingsley's The Folk Keeper and Susan Cooper's The Selkie Girl will be delighted with The Lake Michigan Mermaid. It is a lyrical story for lovers of mermaids and water, for dreamy detectives, for wanderers and artists, for word-lovers and shell-collectors.
~Laura Williams McCaffrey
