Something Rich and Strange (Paperback)

Jonah and Megan are lovers living together in the Pacific Northwest, an artist and a art storekeeper, in a little seaside town where nothing much happens. That is, until the day Adam Fin comes there, with his beautiful pieces of otherworldly jewelry and a mysterious past. Megan finds herself fascinated by Adam, while Jonah finds him strange. Megan is haunted by the sea, by strange and sometimes alarming characters lurking around, and by the image of the sea hare.

But Jonah succumbs to a different kind of siren song, when a beautiful singer at a local bar lures him in with her voice. Soon he has left Megan, the world that he knows, and indeed a good portion of his common sense to follow the beautiful woman down into the waves. Megan agrees to venture down herself, along with the enigmatic Adam, to find her beloved and try to bring him back. In the process, she and Jonah both must discover the dangerous, angry, grieving beauty of the sea and what they must do for it...

This book is shorter than most of McKillip's books and longer than her short stories, yet full-fleshed and believable, the simplicity of the story masked by the ornate language she employs so well. Repeated use of seaweed, pearls, bright fish, shells, mer-creatures, and exotic sea-creatures in unusual roles add a note of dreaminess to the proceedings--not that they need it. Except for a few key Jonah-Megan scenes, the entire book has the feel of a beautiful, prolonged dream.

Also unlike most of McKillip's books, this is a contemporary novel, as evidenced by the first page where Megan finds an Orange Crush can and a styrofoam float. Yet this never interferes with the flow of the book, which deals with imagery as timeless as the sea itself.

The characters are well-drawn: Megan, the rather misty young woman who only really seems to wake up when she heads down into the dreamy world of the sea. Jonah is aptly named, a rather bedazzled young man gets sucked (ironically, by his own will rather than against it) down into the depths. Heck, we even get the line "Welcome to the belly of the whale"!

Adam himself is everything he's supposed to be--sexy, ambiguous, in form as well as in mind, for we see him shift from everything from a man to a splash of shapeshifting sea-foam. His sister is not as defined--we know she is dangerous, beautiful, seductive, etc--but perhaps that is deliberate, as we see little of her but constant hints as Jonah pursues her.

The Message doesn't really beat you over the head, put as poetically as possible and not so obvious throughout the book, though hinted in where Megan walks along the beach and sees the junk strewn around. The message about pollution becomes clearest at the end, but during subsequent rereadings one can see the clues lined up, but never overemphasized. (Too many authors make the mistake of throwing the clues at you; McKillip simply sets them out to be seen, and lets the story remain multilayered)

If you find an affordable copy of this book, BUY IT IMMEDIATELY! Most of the used prices are obscene... I personally had to read this from the library, though I have heard that there are pirated text files on the web.

Overall, if you can find this book it'll prove to be a magical, beautiful journey into an enchanted sea realm. You'll never see a picture of a mermaid the same way again.

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Lovers Jonah and Megan--he the owner of an art store somewhere on the Pacific Northwest coast, she an artist who sketches the sea--find themselves changing into things "rich and strange" when a pair of elusive and fascinating strangers enter their lives. The strangeness begins with little things--images appear of their own accord in Megan's drawings, an enigmatic sculptor named Adam Fin begins to frequent the store--but when a mysterious singer claimed as Adam's sister lures Jonah into her own realm, it changes from a mystery of the everyday world to a mystery of the Otherworld. To find Jonah, Megan will have to first discover and then see past the legends in which Adam and his powerful sister have clothed themselves, and Jonah must learn to look past his fascination with the siren song to see what provokes such terrible beauty, grief, and rage.

The story of "Something Rich and Strange" unfolds like a dream, all the while ringing very true to life. Patricia McKillip's writing is rich in texture and imagery: vivid, precise, and often surreal; she is equally adept at describing the luminous beauty of an undersea kingdom as well as Megan and Jonah's banter over dinner. The images she sculpts have a true ring of otherworldly beauty to them; Adam and his sister speak in human words, but they are not human, and while humans spin stories around their powerful realm, that is not human either. McKillip never lets the reader forget that; her mysterious sea is never ours to claim, only ours to remember and preserve.

Read "Something Rich and Strange" three times: once for the story, once for the jeweled prose, once for its message. And then read it a fourth time, for no reason except that the story deserves it. It will still be good: the changeable sea is eternal.

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