Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Excerpt from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reading Guide |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Readalikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith

Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • First Published:
  • Nov 8, 2016, 240 pages
  • Rate this book

About this Book

Print Excerpt


I don't know how long I sat in the drop, but suddenly I knew I wasn't alone. Urchins, sea horses, red crabs, and such don't trouble my solitude. Only something like me can do that: something warm-blooded and with a type of sense and loyalty. A seal can trouble me, an otter too — and other creatures that come and go but I never see up close, like whales passing on the other side of the wrack. My breath was almost gone now and I felt my body straining toward the air, but there was something there, something hidden in the kelp, and it was something human-like. I leaned forward and stared deep into the forest.

A stillness among the moving curl and tangle of wrack drew my eye. A long shadow rocked in there. Two wild, black eyes were watching me as I watched. A mottled body stretched away back into the speckled light, two tiny hands parted the kelp, and I saw the tail, sinuous, and a face. Its mouth parted in what looked like a grin, and bubbles rose from its lips and nose as if it tried to talk. Then, as quickly as it came, it turned and slipped like a ghost back into the forest of dim beams and rays.

Only a year before, I would have run to tell Auntie Ushag, but all that had changed. I didn't know any longer how to talk to her. She would only roll her eyes and tell me to go away. After all the trouble over a dream, I wasn't about to lure her jibes and temper again. My breath rushed out of me, and I emptied my sack and rose to the sun.


I can't help seeing what I see. It's in me to notice things. I don't mean to.

I sweated that summer through in the heat of my need to know everything my aunt wouldn't tell. I needled and poked and kept on until she told me I put the lie to the old saying that it's better to be quarreling than lonesome. She said that lately she envied lonely people. If she wouldn't start talking, there were others who wouldn't stop. I had an eye for them.

Monthly market days in Shipton were the only days my aunt and I mixed with the others. It was there I'd overheard the talk about us. Why would the Marreys choose to live out there in that wild and shattered place, the earwigs muttered, two women alone and far from humankind? Nothing but the sea to look upon, they told each other, slipping me pitying looks that made me want to bang their heads together. Nobody but each other. . . and the girl growing up now, they whispered, casting cold eyes upon Auntie Ushag.

Last market day of the fall, I'd overheard them in the baker's snug. That Neen Marrey looks to have grown into a sweet girl, one said, and they all made what would have been sounds of agreement, were they not all three sheets to the wind. As it was, they ounded like a coven, cackling and spitting and slap-ping the table. I pressed closer into the wall shadows to hear more. Baker's Cushie said, What she needs is company of her own age, and Ushag should be ashamed, hiding her away in that dark corner of the island to rot and lose all her chances. . . . The young one's like a shy little wood violet. The table of women shrieked like gulls trailing the boats.

You know, she went on loudly, full of herself now that she had them all listening. I've heard that violets grow sweeter when grown near something bitter . . . like onions. The onions draw to themselves the foulness in the soil, see, leaving all the sweetness to the violets. She made a vinegar mouth, and then, as if she couldn't wait, she spat ale and almost burst. That would explain a lot about those two, now, wouldn't it?

Their nasty whispering made me angry. They had a neat way of tucking their point inside something soft-seeming and neighborly. The cutting edge was hidden in a joke or a piece of advice. It was like being sliced by a tiny blade hidden in a goose feather; it took a moment to realize the wound. Every market day, there was a barb for my aunt, and one for me. We were nothing but a type of pastime to them, and it made me even angrier that in one thing their nasty whispers were right. I would have given just about anything to have a friend who wasn't a cow.

Excerpted from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $0 for 0 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book:
  Vikings on the Isle of Man

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Lilac People
    by Milo Todd
    For fans of All the Light We Cannot See, a poignant tale of a trans man’s survival in Nazi Germany and postwar Berlin.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Awake in the Floating City
    by Susanna Kwan

    A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.

  • Book Jacket

    Serial Killer Games
    by Kate Posey

    A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).

  • Book Jacket

    Ginseng Roots
    by Craig Thompson

    A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.

  • Book Jacket

    The Original Daughter
    by Jemimah Wei

    A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

Who Said...

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B W M in H M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.