The Mermaid That Came Between Them

A spritely novel about a father, his son, and the mermaid that captures their hearts.

As a young man visiting the seaside, Jacob met and fell in love with his first love, a mermaid named Claritha. Now a divorced father of a college-age son and writer of maritime adventure stories, Jacob renews his relationship with Claritha only to discover his son has fallen in love with this same bedazzling creature from the sea. Declared unsound by his ex-wife and friends, Jacob pens a nonfiction book about men and menopause in an attempt to make sense of his bizarre love triangle. With its witty word games and playful plot twists, Sima’s forcefully imaginative and ebullient novel turns the question “what if” into a sigh of “if only.”

Publication date: April 1, 2002

Format: Hardcover

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 288 pages

ISBN: 9781566891240

A native New Yorker, Carol Ann Sima wrote the entirety of The Mermaid That Came Between Them “longhand” at coffee shops throughout New York City. Sima works as a grade school language arts teacher for the New York School system and has written for Rain Taxi, Locus, and Science Fiction Chronicle. Her first novel, Jane’s Bad Hare Day, was published by Dalkey Archive.

“As if the Brothers Grimm washed up on the shores of Grace Paley territory, The Mermaid That Came Between Them is a charming tale for the modern age. Carol Ann Sima has written a novel that is not only very funny and chock full of insights on love and loss, it is wondrous and wonderful.” 

—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Hester Among the Ruins

“Combining the whimsy of Peter Beagle with the eroticism of Francesca Lia Block, Carol Ann Sima delivers a postmodern Oedipal fairytale about finny love lost, regained, lost, and transcended. Along with a strong supporting cast, her trio of protagonists—writer Jacob Koleman, his son Mac, and the decidedly unstereotypical undersea siren Claritha—perform a kind of aquatic ballet of desires and confusions on dry land, to much amusement and pathos.” 

—Paul Di Filippo, author of Strange Trades