Book Review: Selkie Moon

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

A compelling folkloric exploration of the push and pull of family life and the power of choice

Set seaside in the Orkney Islands, just north of Scotland, Selkie Moon follows Isla, the daughter of a fisherman father and a mother whose erratic and often animalistic behavior begs questions of her origins. Isla’s mother disappears frequently, sometimes for days at a time, and she fights frequently with Isla’s father. 

While Isla’s mother prefers to school her children in the natural world, swimming in the surf and combing the beaches, her father wants to move the family inland to attend a proper school and better integrate with society. After the birth of her brother, Callan, and a terrifying incident in which Isla watches her father have the webs cut from between Callan’s fingers, the separation between Isla’s parents threatens to become permanent. It is up to Isla alone to get to the bottom of her mother’s possible selkie bloodline while also figuring out her own place in the world. 

In an author’s note at the end of the novella, author Kelly Jarvis gives a brief overview of selkie folklore and also explains how Selkie Moon diverges from common themes. Rather than hit the reader over the head with the fact that Isla’s mother is (possibly) a selkie, Jarvis allows the title of the book and subtle clues to let the reader know what Isla, the narrator, does not. Though Isla knows that her mother is a not-quite-normal human—that she is somehow tied to the sea and separate from the hoi polloi—it isn’t until late in the book that her mother’s origins are laid out for Isla. This slow revelation of Isla’s mother’s selkie-dom is perfectly timed, allowing the reader to focus on how the family handles the mother’s strange clicking sounds, for example, and how the mother does her best to focus on her children. While Selkie Moon could be considered a book about a selkie seduced by a human and stuck in human form, it becomes obvious early on that it is a book about family and about the choice one has to make to put family above self. 

It is this folkloric approach to family that gives Selkie Moon its edge over other family dramas, a certain beauty that both separates the story from modern life but also draws parallels to the realist’s world. Through language alone, Jarvis paints a world that is easy for a reader to be swallowed into. As Isla hits teenagehood, she begins to see similarities between her mother and herself, comparing their faces to “two oval moons with glowing freckle-kissed skin.” 

And the setting—with its aurora borealis, its “simmer dim,” and its islands that, “float in the frigid waters where the North Sea kisses the Atlantic”—is one that feels almost fairytale-esque, a dreamy place that makes the family conflict so much more tense. As Isla realizes that the magical world she lives in isn’t so perfectly divine, the experience turns both devastating and enlightening. 

In just over 100 short pages, Kelly Jarvis has crafted a unique addendum to selkie folklore, expanding it beyond the mere seduction that leads to selkies shedding their seal skins, their wildness, to struggle through the tame and mild life of the land. She has bent the folklore into a relatable story about family and choices, encouraging the reader to see that family, school, and home is a choice. The question is one that compares wildness to tameness; like anyone, both Isla and her mother must choose.

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