A young teacher leaves the classroom for the lure of Hollywood in hopes of turning her novel into a film in American Mermaid, former comedian Julia Langbein's ambitious, satirical debut novel. Penelope is a high school English teacher. Her own debut novel, American Mermaid, which is about a woman who must use a wheelchair on land and transforms into a mermaid in water, becomes a runaway bestseller. Penelope learns she has a genetic mutation that presages breast cancer but an elective double mastectomy is out of reach on her salary. She loves teaching, but suddenly her best option is "to leave teaching, go to Hollywood, assume my place among the other educated 'creatives,' and make bank." Selling a screenplay sounds like easy money, but the experienced screenwriters her agent pairs her with pitch script ideas like "What if she just KNOWS science?" and insist on completely revamping and even killing off her beloved main character, the titular mermaid. Penny struggles between staying true to her artistic voice and selling out for success as a series of strange occurrences--a shattered aquarium, phantom calls--make her wonder if her mermaid is a figment of her imagination at all.
Langbein toggles between Penny's witty first-person narrative and excerpts from the fictional American Mermaid, embedding a screwball sci-fi thriller within a touchingly earnest satire of a society in which a respectable profession can't ensure health care. Come for the laugh-out-loud one-liners, Hollywood glitz and feminist angst, and stay for the creative take on mermaid mythology, family dynamics and metafiction. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads