The Sea Fairies

Trot is the kind of child who asks "why" when every sensible adult says "because." When Cap'n Bill, the old sailor with stump stories, warns her that nobody who sees a mermaid ever lives to tell the tale, she simply asks "why not?" That question propels her straight into the palace of the Sea Fairies, beneath the glittering waves of the Pacific. What begins as a conversation on a California bluff becomes a journey through coral kingdoms, where Trot and her companion meet an aristocratic codfish, befriend a bashful octopus, and are captured by a fearsome sea monster before making a daring escape. Baum's prose bubbles with the same irrepressible imagination that built Oz, but here the magic is wet and strange, lit by bioluminescent palaces and populated by creatures both beautiful and dangerous. The Sea Fairies captures something essential about childhood: the certainty that the world holds more wonders than grown-ups dare to believe. It is for readers who still ask "why not."