Roxy's Reviews: Blog Tour: Excerpt: The Mermaid and the Treasure of the Bay by A. Algeri

Thursday, 30 June 2016

Blog Tour: Excerpt: The Mermaid and the Treasure of the Bay by A. Algeri

The Mermaid and the Treasure of the Bay
(La Sirena #1)

by A. Algeri

Release Date: 08/20/15

246 pages

Summary from Goodreads:

"The Mermaid and the treasure of the Bay" is the first adventure of Brinn, a young woman who had recently returned to her homeland, Nyar Kaad, after years of being away.

For her mother and sister it’s only supposed to be an episodic stay, because their intention is to return to the capital, Adaria, held by both aristocrats, by then, to be their home. Brinn, however, isn’t interested in living in the golden cage of high society and aspires to a different existence, that will push her to oppose the decisions of her family and to pursue a destiny according to her own wishes.

The accidental discovery of what looks like a map to hidden treasure, buried in Nyar Kaad, according to tradition, by pirates once dwelling in the settlement, will push her to search for the hidden riches- an undertaking that the protagonist will face courageously, at the cost of challenging her fears, the rigid social conventions, and more literal dangers to her person, venturing on a journey into the local legends and the past of her own family, until reaching an unexpected epilogue.

Set to Isara, a fantasy world inspired by the period between the seventeenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries, "The Mermaid and the treasure of the Bay" is a journey full of mystery in the universe where real and supernatural coexist intersecting in a subtle and insidious way, a world divided between palaces and largely unexplored expanses, an opulent capital and boundless oceans.

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EXCERPT

I wished that every day was like the ones before, going back to my childhood; outwardly it was as if nothing had changed: in those hopelessly far away years, in the morning after dressing as fast as possible, I ran to my parents to ask my father to take me on a long walk on the beach and then to dive into the weak but deep blue-green warm waters of the bay.

With the passing of time, for my mother it how much I liked living in Nyar Kaad had become intolerable, the place were my family came from, even if we were, at least in part, remotely originally descended from the north of the Empire. I loved the place where I was born so much that I was never able to consider our house in the far away capital where moved in the following years, as my home. I harbored wonderful memories from my childhood of long happy years, as can only exist in memories.

Naturally, the summer couldn't last forever: by the time I was a young girl, my parents had announced our imminent departure from Nyar Kaad to move to the capital. Mom had started talking to me about the important people we would have to meet once we reached Adaria, of the balls and the numerous events that were obligatory for whoever wanted to become part of high society and maybe, if we met the right people, how we might be able to be received at court.

At the time I was too little to fully comprehend the social implications of these events and I associated them only with those evenings in which my parents didn't stay home and my sister Jennifer and I would be left with the nanny, excluding those rare occasions when we had to go with mom while she and her various friends and acquaintances would talk for hours about predictable and uninteresting topics. I, along with the occasional, and according to me, unfortunate children, was forced to pass entire afternoons sitting on a sofa without practically opening my mouth.

I never wanted to leave Nyar Kaad, but my departure never depended on my consent: one rainy day at the end of the summer, when the social season of the small town had been concluded with the ending of the vacations of the rich settlers of the nearby Narim, our departure for Adaria was decided upon and we abandoned, that at the time I believed was forever, the white beaches of the province of Salaara. For a young girl even a few months can seem like an eternity and our return to our hometown at the time no longer seemed possible.

I remember painfully abandoning the Dawn's Light, our estate, the following trip and when, at the moment of disembarkation going down the gangplank that connected the ship to the dock, I found the cold autumn of the northern regions, waiting with its freezing grip ready to enclose my heart, revealing to me a nature that had become a mirror of how I felt in my soul. A cold that whispered to me about how I had been separated possibly forever from the sun and the green waters of the Nahanshe sea, whose voice, as if far away, still called me. “Brinn”, it repeated, as if it was saying my name.

Each day I waited for the much desired return to the ocean shores, whose call you could hear, scarcely whispered along the shores of the Nalach: only the seagulls, that I glimpsed sometimes in the hottest days of the brief northern summer, told me of the far away estuary where large river flowed into the sea.

I repeated to myself that I wanted to see again one day the shores of the Nahanshe Sea and when that moment arrived that I wouldn't leave again: I kept waiting for that day in the depths of my heart without letting anything undermine this certainty or suffocate this dream.

My return to the ocean shores was a wish that remained unchanged in me despite the natural succession of the years: I always refused to bury my dreams underneath my immediate needs, believed by other necessary or set them aside after giving up, coming to consider them impossible. I would never have accepted discovering one day that all my aspirations had been extinguished by an existence lost in a myriad of empty mundane gestures after being forced to turn down a path able to deaden forever the light that had illuminated my heart and to be destined to a dusty series of days one identical to the other. At that point I would have only been able to realize how much time had passed and what I had given up; I would have only been aware of an unfulfilled happiness in a past relegated to a far off time.

I wasn't willing to accept a similar future: returning to Nyar Kaad had always been my dream, jealously hidden in me, that I could see every time I closed my eyes- immobile and perfect, a moment frozen in the eternal and inconstant waves of time; the house on the sea, the very white sand, the waves that died on the shoreline, the breeze blowing off the sea every morning. And yet, as with every wish no matter how much I wished to go back to the bay and the ocean and hear its voice again with all my heart, this dream seemed to me, or least I believed so, destined to never happen.

About the Author

A. Algeri is the author of "The Mermaid and the treasure of the Bay", his first published novel. He began writing while he was a teenager, setting most of his stories in the world of Isara, a fantasy universe of his own creation.

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