After an early-morning walk on the shore to gather clams, 20-year-old Aylee Garrow begins an ordinary day’s work in her parents’ bustling shop. Sent out back to retrieve bottles for a customer, Aylee comes upon a naked stranger hiding in a dark storage shed. The young man with aquamarine and cobalt eyes seems lost—stumbling over English words he can’t quite grasp. Over the ensuing months, Aylee, the young man—Cailean—and the townspeople follow an ancient, familiar, dangerous dance of friendship, love and suspicion.
Author Kami King Larsen’s craft is impressive for a first published effort and her realization of the turn-of-the-century town in Ireland is lyrical. The story arc, foreshadowing, and pacing are steady and confident. The Garrow’s shop, the power of the town’s main employer—an expanding whiskey distillery—and the ever-present lure and danger of the sea weave well through a solid plot drawn on the centuries-old Irish folk figures of selkies and banshees. But the town’s antique charm hides a harsher reality: normal local kindness can burn away like early morning mist when a stranger appears. For centuries, authors have explored the boundary between the human and mythic worlds. Like Larsen, some writers use this edge to touch on the human fear of the unknown—exposing, again, how our ability to recognize difference outpaces our ability to assess its worth or danger. In just this way, Cailean and Aylee unlock the town’s frightening capacity for hostility.
Larsen’s story is warm and well-written, and much of its effectiveness relies on her credible characterization of Aylee, to whom she gives the plucky courage and good-hearted nature of a true heroine. However, Larsen’s Aylee is also insecure, and like her neighbors, even Aylee has the capacity to judge people based on limited evidence. These very human attributes, along with Larsen’s keen ear for dialogue between friends, adds satisfying dimensionality to Aylee critical to the success of the novel.
Kami King Larsen’s A SIMPLE TALE OF WATER AND WEEPING is a well-crafted, richly visualized, satisfying story of a nameless town in a magical Ireland now past that speaks also to the world we live in today.
~Ellen Graham for IndieReader