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Letter to the editor

Earning her tail doesn't solve a little mermaid's problems

By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Book Editor
Published October 7, 2007

At the beginning of Swim to Me, the second novel by former magazine editor Betsy Carter, 16-year-old Delores Walker lives in her sad family's crummy Bronx apartment but dreams of Weeki Wachee. She had visited the famed Florida roadside attraction with her parents a few years before, in 1970, and dreamed ever since of being one of the graceful, miraculous swimmers.

After her father deserts the family - Delores, her mom and baby brother Westie, named for the Best Western hotel across from Weeki Wachee where he was conceived - she gathers her courage and writes a letter asking for a mermaid job.

Back comes an invitation to try out from stern director and former mermaid Thelma Foote. Delores gets on the Greyhound, and before you can say "splish splash," she's Delores Taurus, one of the stars of the City of Mermaids.

Actually, in the mermaid dorm, she's one of a gaggle of awkward girls who "had never been cheerleaders . . . outsiders with no one to turn to but each other." But in the water, Delores is sublime.

She's so sublime that before long she's not only performing at Weeki Wachee but delivering the weather report for a Tampa TV station - with her sparkly green tail on, from a bath tub.

But, despite her growing celebrity and the self-confidence she gains from living on her own, Delores pines for her family and aches with guilt for having run away from her mother and Westie, just as her father had.

Even for a girl who can drink a soda underwater, rescue a drowning child during a hurricane and fend off a sleazy TV producer, patching up a fractured family is no easy stunt.

Carter's touch is light in Swim to Me, which won't surprise readers of her bestselling memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On: The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist, which chronicled how she bounced back from a disfiguring accident, a nasty divorce, breast cancer, business failure and a house fire (whew).

Carter, who grew up in Miami, does a fine job of capturing Florida in the '70s, just beginning to boom with growth. She visited Weeki Wachee while working on the book, but this is clearly a fictional version of the attraction.

Carter plays loose with geography in the service of her story, moving the legendary circus hangout Giant's Camp from Gibsonton up the coast to near Weeki Wachee, so she can embroider the mermaid story with swimming circus elephants.

Outlandish, yes, but Swim to Me works by combining kitsch and whimsy with the story of the real girl inside the tail, a girl - and a tale - with gentle humor and a warm heart.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

Swim to Me
By Betsy Carter
Algonquin Books, 279 pages, $23.95

[Last modified October 3, 2007, 17:47:31]