I picked up this book thinking it would be an urban fantasy novel about a mermaid. What I got instead was a tale of a young woman fighting to keep herself alive in a world determined to destroy her. It's not so much about mermaids, as such, but about discrimination in all of ' forms, and the struggle that the marginalised peoples of this world have to face every single day, because of the ignorance which prevails. Ell's mermaid ancestry is almost a metaphor with her entire, heartbreaking life being an allegory of the battle that those who are ever so slightly different from the 'norm' have to face.

As mentioned, Ell's story is heartbreaking, and Dreams of Song Times is a difficult, but compelling, read. Her story begins when she's washed up on a small spit of land consisting of blue rocks, sea grass and powdery sand. She can not really remember how she ended up there, but she can remember the events leading up to her Cast Away location. She has a book with her, rammed down the front of her wetsuit, and that book, she believes, holds the entire history of mermaids - or Rhfunia, in their ancient tongue. And, while she sits on one of the rocks on the small island she's claimed, she deigns it important enough to tell us how she ended up there.

Ell begins to tell her life story by recounting a memory from her Grade school days. When she watched The Little Mermaid for the first time, and the casual racism she encounters from her classmates. "You can't be a mermaid, Ell," one girl tells her. "Your skin isn't the right tone. It's nice and all, sort of walnutty. But mermaids are really white, like Ariel.". It's that sort of off handed comment which shapes Ell's very life. Later, she's invited to a party thrown by the girl, where Ell is forced to be Ursula along with another girl, who isn't quite 'white enough' to be Ariel. It's the first of her experiences of cruelty at the hand of Ariels, but that comes much, much later.

Her parents, Ahr and Per, are extremely cautious and implore Ell to never ever tell their secret. That she's a mermaid. But they never explain why. When her parent's disappear one morning when she's just 16, Ell is forced to face the fact that she's one of the last of her kind, and that her parents caution was very much needed. She escapes, barely, and runs away from Baltimore to a small town in Vermont. It's there she meets the other types of non-Disney Ariels; much more deadly and way crueller than the ones from her childhood. She's betrayed, by the people she's come to depend on, and in her own way, love.

What Dreams of Song Tides does so well, is highlight the individual stories of marginalised people without preaching. It's unequivocal in its approach about the plight of Indigenous Peoples, LGBTQIA+ and Black Lives. It handles, delicately, the way that societal expectations can have repercussions on the lives of immigrants, even within their own communities. One character is struggling against his parents demands for him to follow their dreams instead of his own. But, if it fails at anything, it's that the characters only ever have room for one passion at a time. Be it Ell's love of books when she's working at a bookstore in Vermont - or later, her passion for human rights. At one point, there's a rally, where to get their point across, the activists show a slide of an endangered Jaguar - to then say that they can't worry about that when their own lives are at risk. While they have a point - people have room in their hearts for more than one concern. One can be worried about the wildlife and endangered species around the planet, as well as be concerned about the persecution of discriminated people. And that's why I've awarded it only four stars. If Bernstein had perhaps added a bit of dimension to her characters, allowing them to feel more than one emotion at a time, or have more than one passion, then this would have been, undoubtedly a five star review.

S. A