Very good illustrations (photos of paper dioramas, which have a very cool effect) and a nice, simple story. Very pleasant to read. ( )

Very nicely illustrated story of a young farm girl that dreams of being a mermaid and uses her imagination to transform the landscape around her into an ocean...
Gift for my niece ( )

This story follows a farm girl that dreams of being a mermaid and uses her imagination to shape the landscape around her into an ocean. Although I was never fascinated with mermaids like other children, I resonated with this book in an unexpected way, as all who let their imagination fly when roaming the outdoors will. It is a lovely book with a relatable storyline of loving where you live but also dreaming of more. That being said, this is a book that is more likely to capture the heart of the adults reading it out loud than the children listening. ( )

Elly MacKay is a terrific illustrator and while the conceit of this book is a little silly, the beauty of the words and the images carries you along. It's poetry and I'm happy to read it again.

Not everyone satisfies their dreams of living in another time or place by looking in the pages of a book. Some choose to see the world around them remade into the world of their dreams. Kallie George introduces us to one such unnamed dreamer, who self-identifies on four occasions with the line "I am a meadow mermaid." Not only does this meadow mermaid "see the sea in the sky,/starfish in the stars,/a whale's tail in a slip of the moon," but she can "swim through oceans of grass" and "swim through choppy seas." Unfortunately, elsewhere repeated verbs, descriptions and lines seem less intentional and more unpolished. For example, the meadow mermaid feels the "waves in the wheat," then several pages later spots a shipwreck "through the waves of wheat." The twice-repeated line "I listen for the music of a mermaid a million miles away" also seemed appropriate in the second case, as it just precedes introduction of kindred spirit named Milla. The first use of the phrase seems more filler. That's all really nit-picking though, something to take a 1/2-star away when my nine-year-old says to keep it at 5. I do love the beautiful idea and author-illustrator pairing.

In fact, I have long admired Elly MacKay's magically glowing, photographed dioramas. Her first collaboration with Kallie George, The Secret Fawn, was the first picture book I'd read in a long time to remind me of how delightful childhood can be. Needless to say, I was thrilled to receive an advance copy of I Am a Meadow Mermaid as a LibraryThing early reviewer. I am pleased to add it to our library and look forward to sharing it with others. ( )