The Tail of Emily Windsnap

The documents in the chest in Chapter 9 suggest The Voyager is being used by Neptune and his agents as a base, offering more support for The Relationship Between Identity and Power. By keeping merfolk afraid of humans and explicitly ordering them to stay away from land or sunken human ships, Neptune is free to use areas closer to land or human debris for his purposes. The reports about Emily and her parents further suggest that Neptune does not necessarily believe the tales about humans that he tells. Instead of staying away from humans himself because he fears or reviles them, Neptune has been keeping a close eye on Emily’s family. Neptune also has Mr. Beeston keep files on Emily’s mom and the effectiveness of the memory-wipe drug because her case is a special one. When humans encounter a merfolk once, a single memory-wipe is enough for them to forget. In the case of Emily’s mom, who had a long relationship and a child with a merman, the drugs must be administered at regular intervals. Thus, Emily’s mom becomes an experiment to see exactly what is necessary to protect the merfolk world from prolonged exposure to humans.

Emily’s mom remembers everything about the last 12 years in these chapters, and the effect of the memory drug shows the complexities of memory, as well as how the human and merfolk worlds cannot be truly kept apart. The first time she sees Rainbow Rocks triggers strong emotions—namely love and sadness. This reveals that love is stronger than the memory-wiping drugs Mr. Beeston gives her, speaking to the theme of The Resilient Nature of Love and Identity. This moment also reveals Mr. Beeston’s true nature. Up until now, Emily has questioned the man’s stories and motives without any definitive proof he is acting to hurt Emily or her mom. Realizing Mr. Beeston has been drugging her mom triggers Emily’s fight to restore her family and begins the rising action of the novel.

The journey Emily and Shona undergo in Chapter 9 offers more specific information about the differences between merfolk and half-merfolk. Though Emily and Shona are the same age, Shona has lived in the water all her life and is more familiar with what long-distance swimming requires. Her full mermaid nature also makes her genetically built for swimming long distances and dealing with the ebbs and swells of the ocean. By contrast, Emily struggles to swim for as long as Shona, partly because of her inexperience swimmer and partly because of her part-mermaid nature—she does not have the same genetic aptitude for living in the water. Such differences have kept merfolk wary of part-merfolk for generations.