‘The Changeling Sea’ a vivid fairy tale

  The sea-dragon
  There it was, beyond the spires, rising up out of the stormy waters, bright as flame, with the sunlight itself looped around its neck.
  It was watching the only movement on the beach: Peri.
  She stopped, her mouth open. It lingered, massive and curious, its bright streamers swirling in the restless water. The delicate brow fins over its great eyes flicked up and down like eyebrows. It had a mustache of thin streamers above its mouth. It washed to and fro in the water, its eyes like twin red suns hovering above the sea.
  The sea-dragon brings Peri into a world of magic — magic she herself uses to hex the sea for taking her father and leaving her mother staring at the water in search of the land just beneath its surface.
  Peri’s anger draws her to the water, and it is there that she becomes entangled in the story of the king’s changeling sons — one born from a mother of the earth, one from a mother of the sea, both bound to the water or land to which they feel they don’t belong.
  "Once upon a time, there was a king who had two sons: one by the young queen, his wife, and one by a woman out of the sea. The sons were born at the same time, and when the queen died in child-bed, her human son was stolen away, and the sea-born son left in his place. Why? No one truly knows, only the woman hidden in the sea, and the king."
  The young princes enchant Peri and she begins to do what she can to grant their hearts' desire and return them to their own worlds. She finds help in the form of a young magician, and as they attempt to erase the princes’ longing, Peri herself recognizes her own yearning for what the sea has stolen — and given.
  Patricia McKillip’s grasp of fantasy cannot be matched. Her vivid, colorful fairy tales transport readers to a world where anything they can imagine is possible.
  Readers awaken in lands where magic rules, and through McKillip’s descriptive writing, can smell the salt in the air and the sand under their feet.
  “The Changeling Sea” is one of McKillip’s shorter novels, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less creative or imaginative.
  A journey through one of these books is like waking up inside a painting of an evergreen forest, and knowing that just beyond the trees is a lush land full of rich color and powerful magic that turns reality into a dream.