Judge’s comments on The Bog Mermaid

While I wait to read the actual publication contract, Red Hen Press are keeping me happy with the delightful comments from Elizabeth Bradfield, the judge of the Quill Prose Award (the one Mermaid just won!)

What does a bog contain?  Water, layer upon layer of sphagnum, darkness, cold; things preserved in that airless chill beyond what light and air would allow.  So the past burbles into the present, and currents between people and within families haunt the pages of this book.  Something of Sarah Waters’s restrained sense of strange eddies through “The Bog Mermaid,” a disturbance more emotional than narrative.  There are silences here left unspoken, unexplained, but I know they hold truths, and I trust the writer’s restraint, their urging to listen to echoes and, by that, understand the shape of what creates them. The book haunts me. 

What a wonderful cover blurb this would make!