New from Margo Lanagan - author of Tender Morsels -- is there a writer I admire more? 
 Goodreads description from when it first came out: 
 "I'm just completing the first draft of a novel called The Brides of Rollrock Island, which is about selkies - that is, seals that come up out of the sea and transform into humans, and live among people. It's a very sad, strange story; a lot of people in it make themselves wretched with magic. But of course it's beautiful and atmospheric too - the selkies themselves are beautiful, but so is the landscape, the seascape, the weather, and some of the humans. This novel is also less violent than Tender Morsels, so a lot more readers will find it easier to stomach, I hope. I believe it'll come out as YA here in Australia and in the US, but as a crossover, in adult and YA editions, in the UK, as Tender Morsels did." 
 Man, did I wait a long time for this one! And though it is quieter, not as shattering, as Tender Morsels, it still provides a LOT to think about for a long time after. You may want to find someone else who has read it so you can discuss what was between the lines, between the generations, what was said about gender roles and animal roles and magic and childbirth and marriage and loyalty and revenge and morality. There's a lot at play here...a lot. And yet it all sort of feels like a sea lullaby. Ignore the horrid cover and be prepared to be swimming in this one for a while. 
 Links to ponder (though I recommend reading the book without too much foreknowledge of the plot): 
 Book trailer and Q&A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY_TbU... 
 http://www.yellowbrickreads.com/2012/... 
 http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/09/sea-... 
 http://www.strangehorizons.com/review... 
 Favorite quotes (hidden by spoiler tag, though nothing is exactly spoilery): 
 (view spoiler)["Oh, to be one of them, never enduring such visions and sensations as I did! I ached to be as ordinary as I'd been only yesterday, as dull and frustrated and quietly beaten down. That smaller world, which I'd known only too well and found so disagreeable -- would I ever be lucky enough to return to it?" (p. 29) 
 "The air was as still as a held breath." (p. 60) 
 "I felt cleansed of the rage and misery that had made up so much of me in pettier company, in prettier. I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person's -- or the next fish's, or the next grass blade's! -- and not a whit less. How piddling I was, in the general immensity! And how lovely it was to be tiny and alone, to have quickened to living for a moment here, to be destined soon to blink out and let time wash away all mark and remembrance of me." (p. 64) 
 "My new eyes looked around at the shadowy kitchen; it would never hold me again as it had. I was here, but I was no longer trapped here." (p. 65) 
 "All the years to come crowded into that time, and I lived them, long and bitter and empty of him. The rightness of what I had done, and the wrongness both, they tore at me, and repaired me, and tore again, and neither of them was bearable." (p. 76) 
 "She was beyond being explained to, brought forward into the present; it was easier to talk to her in the language of her delusions." (p. 86) 
 "...the smell promised cleansing, and horizons, and sky, a flying-out from this, a floating-out, an altogether larger, fresher way of living than we'd so far been cramped up in. I looked around in hope as much as in horror." (p. 124) 
 "Here on Rollrock was the stillness I remembered from before, the small silence of the house within the quiet of the small town within the vast airy wordless limitlessness of weather and water. At heart, I was not a Cordlin man, betrothed and businesslike; I was a carefree boy following my fancies around Rollrock's lanes and field walls, too young to realize anything was amiss." (p. 153) 
 "Kitty and I had always been turning over matters and objects familiar to both of us; by comparison, that had been like talking to myself, I was so easily understood. From here, on the beach, with Neme questioning me and her slim foreign hand in the crook of my arm, the conversation with Kitty seemed a dull one, revealing nothing, taking neither of us anywhere new." (p. 172) 
 "I shook my head, not in agreement or otherwise at what he said, but only at how, whosoever's pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else." (p. 270) 
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