The Mer Chronicles Book #1

Since her father died, Kate Sweeting’s home life has been in the pits, her well-being on life support. Her future looks desolate until she and her mother, Cara, make another plan: abandon their shriveled existence for more promising prospects on the coast, where Cara can play small-town librarian-bachelorette and Kate can figure out what’s up with that secretive Blake family from the beach. Everyone is eerily captivated with Kate and her mother, and Cara is the first to figure out why when the man of her dreams arrives all dripping and devoted and closed-mouthed about what he intends. Kate is willing to go along with their subterfuge for a while but eventually makes a charge for the water to learn what her mother is hiding. Gabe Blake is there waiting for her…and so is someone considerably less friendly. By the time Kate navigates her way home, everything will have changed for her—what she feels, what she wants, and what she’ll risk being with the man she loves.

“Updrift likely began in my girlhood—I’m thinking 1976—when the mythology of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” sunk its teeth into me and ate me whole. I honestly wonder at our decision to shelve fairy tales in the children’s section when so many of them are these brutal, brutal tragedies… and “Little Mermaid” is no different. Seriously, read “The Little Match Girl” or “The Red Shoes” at your local library and just try to walk away undevastated!

I remained captivated with TLM’s mythology throughout my twenties, when the story simmered beneath my struggles to finish college, establish myself in a career, run the modern dating gauntlet and try to look breezy and confident during it all, which I did NOT accomplish. A husband and child and three jobs later, I finally sat down to try and make sense of modern life and modern womanhood; and Andersen’s fable helped me write it out. In this sense, Updrift was a way for me to knit up my own coming of age via a kind of corollary post-mortem.
But Updrift is not an autobiography, and neither is it the Little Mermaid retold, although I’d love for you to see a reflection of the original in my book. Can you guess who most closely mimics Andersen’s heroine? When you’ve finished the novel, think back on who was most compelled to abandon friends and family for love, who in the end preferred his own destruction to that of his beloved. It’s twisted, I know, but hopefully in the right way.

Happy reading, everyone.”— Errin Stevens

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