I decided i’d read this just to get my mermaid thing going before reading The Mermaid by Christina Henry.
I have to say, i’m very disappointed.
Silly little girl falls in love with handsome prince who she can’t have because she’s just not good enough and he loves another, blah, blah, blah. So she has to die, like dead forever, because mermaids don’t have immortal souls like human beings do because they’re obviously just animals and Anderson obviously believes that animals don’t have souls and probably agrees with Descartes that you can even nail them to doors and dissect them without anaesthetic because they’re just soulless things unworthy of our consideration.
But wait, Hans gives this disgusting, soulless animal a chance, she can have legs to go on land and woo the handsome prince but she has to lose her voice by having her tongue cut out and suffer the pain of walking on knives for her whole life to do so. So desperate is this soulless creature that she agrees to this obscene torture. If she gets the prince to own her through marriage thus becoming a responsible pet owner for this soulless animal then god will bestow a soul upon this creature and it can live happily ever after as the sex slave of the prince. Otherwise she’s just going to be a bit of nothing floating on the wind for all eternity.
And then we’re told that if children are good then the little mermaid may still get a soul and go to heaven but if children are bad then she won’t. So if you you’re ever a naughty child, even for a moment, then you’re obviously a fucking evil little shit who hates mermaids. WTF!!! But mermaids are soulless animals who don’t get to go to heaven so its a bit confused as to whether a child should be worried about being good when its not actually the child’s fault in the first place that mermaids are soulless animals who god obviously hates and doesn’t want in heaven anyway.
Children should not have a sense of right and wrong built upon fairy tales, imaginary beings and/or other such nonsense. Because what do you think is going to happen when the child finds out that everything it believed you told it was true is a complete lie that you conjured up in order to hoodwink and con the child into behaving to your unreasonable demands?
I seriously would not read this to any child i had in my care. It’s disgusting, backward, patriarchal, god-grovelling drivel. Some books really should be burned and/or deleted.
A wonderful collection. You never know when you might feel the need to read a fairy tale.