As a boy, Daniel Jennings did not feel at home on the small island off the coast of British Columbia where he lived with his grandfather. He wanted to know all the things he was missing in the larger world. His grandfather's love was strong and certain, but it could not console this longing. Then one day Daniel sees a mermaid on the beach, glistening and beautiful and as shy as Daniel himself. She disappears quickly but later Daniel finds a key inside a seashell and he knows it is a gift from her. He never gives up hope of seeing her again but in the meantime the key--magical and mysterious--becomes Daniel's talisman. He wears it around his neck and whenever it vibrates it leads him without fail to something or someone in need, from an injured animal to a lost child. Over the years, with the help of the key, he begins to feel part of the island--part of its natural life, and part of the small community of people who inhabit it. It unlocks his heart, and in doing so it leads him to a deeper understanding of what it means to be at home. Cynthia Rylant's sea- swept fantasy, told in the calm, centered voice of the adult Daniel, sustains an element of mystery as well as it unravels the secret of the mermaid, and the truth about Daniel's heart. (Age 9-12)

The year he is ten, Daniel Jennings meets a mermaid. With a single word, she opens the world for him, though he must puzzle out her meaning over another ten years on the wind-scoured coast of Coquille, the Pacific Northwest island upon which Daniel lives with his grandfather. They are a quiet pair, islands themselves. Daniel, for instance, never tells his grandfather about the key that, after the mermaid slips away, a sea otter brings to him in a shell. The boy wears the key on a string around his neck and soon learns its miraculous powers for saving life. His grandfather never teas him of a girl whose name Daniel knows but does not recognize until after the old man can tell him nothing. Daniel's story is of marvelous happenings, told in the rapt and measured voice of a young man finding, for the first time, peace after tumult, pattern beneath life s apparent imbalance. The mermaid. Is she a messenger, a creature from one of the many stories the boy has read? Or is she a ghost?