SFINCS3 Review: Selkie Moon by Kelly Jarvis
- Angela Boord
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”)a is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.
Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.
We are all surrounded by darkness. And we are all drawn to the light.
The Orkney Islands north of Scotland are steeped in stories of selkies, seal folk who swim in cold ocean waters and shed their skins to sing and dance on land. One young girl named Isla uses legends of selkie brides to understand her parents’ troubled marriage and navigate her strained relationship with her mother. As Isla comes of age, she confronts the sacred points of transformation found between sea and land, nature and civilization, and past and present, uncovering the key to her identity.
Selkie Moon is a novella for all those who believe stories can illuminate the deepest and darkest waters of the human soul.
Review
Selkie Moon is an interesting, contemporary take on the basic selkie story, a favorite of fantasy re-tellings. If you’re not familiar with selkies, they’re basically shapeshifters: they live in the ocean as seals, but when they come to land, they can take off their seal skin and walk around as human beings. In most of the traditional tales I’m familiar with, the selkie is usually a woman in a romantic relationship with a man who has cunningly hidden her sealskin to keep her from running back to the sea. Selkie Moon is a little different. Rather than a simple retelling, this novella brings the selkie story into the complicated play of modern relationships. For the most part, I think it pulls this off quite well, with a deep focus on character and a more literary air that plays on the darkness of the traditional tales. The ending didn’t quite come off for me, but overall, this was a contemplative story I enjoyed reading.
Isla is a child of the Orkney Islands, the daughter of an ordinary fisherman and a rather strange mother who grows increasingly wild and unhappy when fettered in by too much civilization. Her strange mother also speaks in clicks and gives birth to a baby boy, Isla's brother, covered in down, with webbing between his fingers. In the general way of things, Isla doesn't really know that her mother is strange, or that her parents’ tumultuous relationship isn’t normal, until she begins to take her place in the town on the main island where her father’s family lives—to go to school, to see the lives of other people. Selkie Moon is as much about mothers and daughters and the attempted taming of the feminine as it is about selkies, and it's Isla's relationship with her mother, her growing and changing perception of her parents' marriage and her mother's role in it, that really drives the story.
The writing in Selkie Moon is impressive. I was especially surprised to learn that the author had never been to the Orkneys, because the setting feels so detailed and real. The wild isolation of the islands almost becomes another character, holding all the human characters in a sort of liminal space where they can come and go between wilderness and town, magic and the mundane, as they choose. Isla's mother swims in the rough, dangerous seas and is sometimes gone for days, but then she's back in their kitchen at home, just a mother cooking eggs for her family's breakfast.
There are some disturbing scenes in this novella involving what felt to me like borderline instances of abuse. These scenes were raw and visceral and packed an emotional punch that I felt like was glossed over and even diminished somewhat by the ending. I have to admit, this left me feeling a little dissatisfied, like there was unfinished business that hadn’t been dealt with. (Possibly this is also because Jarvis’s character work is excellent and by the ending, I was quite attached to Isla’s mother!) The ending seemed to come together very abruptly, and I wasn't sure that what we'd seen of all the relationships leading up to that point supported the conclusion we were told to draw about them. I felt like there was a lot of telling in the ending and I ended up feeling a little knocked over the head by that, almost like we'd shifted from fiction to literary analysis.
But overall, this book was a quiet little emotional gem. Definitely recommended for readers who like selkies, fairy tale and mythological re-imaginings rather than straight retellings, stories about mothers and daughters, and fantasy with a literary twist!
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