Review: Sea Change - Aimee Friedman

Summary from Amazon.com: 16-year-old Miranda Merchant is great at science...and not so great with boys. After major drama with her boyfriend and (now ex) best friend, she's happy to spend the summer on small, mysterious Selkie Island, helping her mother sort out her late grandmother's estate.
There, Miranda finds new friends and an island with a mysterious, mystical history, presenting her with facts her logical, scientific mind can't make sense of. She also meets Leo, who challenges everything she thought she knew about boys, friendship...and reality.
Is Leo hiding something? Or is he something that she never could have imagined?

I’m surprised there aren’t more YA books about selkies. After reading Melissa Marr’s awesome short story ‘Love Struck’ in the Love Is Hell anthology, I went on an internet trawl for more selkie tales. What I found was Aimee Friedman’s Sea Change.

Reading this book is like having a really beautiful dream. Friedman’s writing is enchanting and evocative, and I was left with memories of Selkie Island that seemed almost as real as if I’d been there myself. Miranda is a likeably down to earth heroine, and her romance with Leo has that sweet ‘first love’ feeling about it.

If anything, I guess this book may be a little too dreamlike for some. If you like your YA paranormal romances heavy on the superpowers, magic and melodrama, be prepared for a change of pace. Sea Change is not a really deep read - it’s a light but captivating story, like a breath of sea air.

YA authors writing about fairies tend to give their fey creations a dark edge - they’re not the twee little creatures your Granny told you about; they’re spiky and dangerous. I was expecting Sea Change to take a similar line on selkies, but Aimee Friedman has given Miranda an edge instead - she’s a logic-wielding New Yorker dropped into a setting where past blends with present, and myth with reality. As events on Selkie Island unfold, she doesn’t know what to believe - and as a reader, I found myself willing the impossible to be true.