Julia Langbein

A brilliantly funny debut novel that follows a writer lured to Los Angeles to adapt her feminist mermaid novel into a big-budget action film, who believes her heroine has come to life to take revenge for Hollywood’s violations.

Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist novel 'American Mermaid' becomes a best-seller.  Lured by the promise of a big payday, she quits teaching and moves to L.A. to turn the novel into an action flick with the help of some studio hacks. But as she’s pressured to change her main character from a fierce, androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Threats appear in the screenplay; siren calls lure Penelope’s co-writers into danger.  Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her mermaid come to life, enacting revenge for Hollywood’s violations?

'American Mermaid' follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a ruthless industry town, where she discovers a beating heart in her own fiction, a mermaid who will fight to move between worlds without giving up her voice. A hilarious story about deep things, 'American Mermaid' asks how far we’ll go to protect the parts of ourselves that are not for sale.

A Novel

American Mermaid

Amelia

I put the cigarette back in its box, notice the lighter was in there the whole time. I pull out my phone, Google Ten Wives for Two Brothers. She made it up. Goddamn teenagers. Checkmate. Do not go to war with women in a state of becoming. Their dark arts are deep and indomitable.

God, these women are mature. Lionesses, lounging but alert, ears twitching, beautiful in their differences. I can't stop moving my eyes from one to another, drinking in their self-possession, their confdence, their full, ripe intellects poised atop their messy, lush, new bodies. They are magnificent.

Everyone is reborn here. Or does porn here. Finds something, The plant never closes. We are not the men in boiler suits whose TVs get taken. Our failures evaporate in the sun and rain back down in other forms.

American Mermaid quotes

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