Real Mermaids is a series of young adult novels by Hélène Boudreau. It follows Jade Baxter, a thirteen-year-old girl who finds out that her mother Michaela was a mermaid, and that she can turn her legs into a tail by breathing water.
The books in the series:
- Real Mermaids Don't Wear Toe Rings (2010)
- Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath (2012)
- Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels (2013)
- Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells (2013)
Real Mermaids contains examples of:
- 555: Jade's number is 555-1212.
- Alliterative Family: In Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels, the protagonists meet a family of mers: Portagus and Pollinia, their daughter Petra, and their long-lost son Penelopus, a.k.a. Luke.
- Antagonistic Offspring: In Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels, Jade learns that Michaela is the daughter of the Dame Council, the tyrannical leader the heroes want to overthrow.
- Auto-Incorrect: In Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels, Jade tries to text her boyfriend Luke Martin that his adopted brother Trey could use some brotherly tips. Autocorrect turns it into "brotherly chips," "lobsterly tips," and "lobsterly lips" before Jade gives up.
- Bathtub Mermaid: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Jade's father Dalrymple invents the Merlin 3000, a portable bathtub with just the right oxygen levels to help mers transform into humans. (Half-mers like Jade can transform from human to mer and back again in a few minutes, but full-blooded mers have to spend anywhere from hours to weeks partly immersed in water.)
- Better as Friends: In the first book, Jade's best friend Cori Blake starts dating Trey Martin. Cori spends most of the fourth book wanting to be romantic with Trey and being annoyed that he won't be serious. In the end she decides that she likes Trey's goofy personality, just not in a boyfriend. The two break up, but stay good friends.
- Blackmail: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Jade and Cori trespass in a construction site to look for the tidal pool where they think Jade's mom is staying. A security guard catches them, but he lets them go after Cori threatens to report him for watching TV on the job.
- Common Law Marriage: Michaela never got a legal identity when she came on land to live as a human, so she wasn't able to marry Dalrymple. Despite that, they've been in a relationship for at least fifteen years. Everyone else, including Jade, assumed they were married until Jade learns the truth in Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels. By Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, Michaela has finally gotten some forged documents. She and Dalrymple have their wedding in the Bahamas.
- Crying Wolf: Dillon, a sixteen-year-old conch diver who appears in Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, sees someone throw a body from a cruise ship near Nassau. He tries to report it, but he's a troublemaker who's been arrested for panhandling and theft, and everyone assumes it's another one of his tricks. It takes Dillon being kidnapped for people to take his report seriously. It turns out that what he saw wasn't a dead body, but a live mer who was being forced to work as a drug mule.
- Cup Holders: In Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels, Jade's dad upgrades the Merlin 3000 into the Merlin 3001, which has lots of new features, including five cup holders.
- Dirty Cop: In Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, Officer Carl Ensel turns out to be running a drug ring. He hires people to smuggle large amounts of cough medicine into the Bahamas, synthesizes it into a dangerous drug called Grip, and then gets local teenagers to deal it.
- Fainting: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Cori falls off a rock into the ocean and hits her head. Jade, still in mermaid form, has to rescue her. When Cori regains consciousness, she remembers seeing Jade with a tail and immediately faints again.
- Fell Asleep Crying: A few hours after getting her period, Jade cries herself to sleep in the bath because her Missing Mom isn't there to help her with it. Her face slips under the water, and she wakes up with a mermaid tail.
- Fish out of Water: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, a teenage Mer named Serena turns into a human for the first time and moves in with the Baxters. She doesn't speak English or understand any human social norms and is totally confused by things like the bathroom mirror, which she spends thirty minutes trying to talk to because she thinks there's a girl trapped inside.
- Frame-Up: Serena's parents, Finalin and Medora, were framed for murdering the last Dame Council and imprisoned in Talisman Lake. Their real crime was criticizing the Mermish Council. Apparently a lot of the other prisoners in Talisman Lake are there for the same reason.
- Games of the Elderly: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Jade's gran plays TV bingo while babysitting her. She wins an envelope full of cash.
- Gang of Bullies: In Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, Rayelle is hassled both inside and outside of school by a group of girls who sell necklaces and use the money to buy expensive accessories. When Dillon was in school he would stand up for her, but now that he's dropped out, she's on her own. Luckily for Rayelle, it turns out that most of their money comes not from selling necklaces, but from dealing drugs. Once Dillon reports their activities to the police, her problem is solved.
- Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Jade uses curse words she learned from her Gran: "Sugarplum! Fiddlesticks! Pickle juice!"
- Hands-Off Parenting: Dillon is the child of a Disappeared Dad and a mom who doesn't care where he goes or what he does as long as he brings home money. After he goes missing, it takes three days before she gets concerned.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier:
- Jade, her parents, and Luke talk to each other in English to avoid being overheard by Mers who only know Mermish.
- After Jade finds out Luke is a Mer, they talk to each other in the high frequency used for underwater communication, which sounds like a barely-audible buzz to people with purely human ancestry.
- Human Subspecies: Jade's dad finds a book about mermaids which says that humans are descended from merpeople, or Pesco-sapiens, which are in turn descended from apes.
- Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Chelse Becker's ex-boyfriend posts a video on Facebook of her tripping over a dog, falling off a dock, and flailing around in the water. The video gets hundreds of comments. Chelse is furious at first, but later she uses an edited version of the video to attract attention to the Butterflies vs. Boutiques Facebook page.
- Laughing at Your Own Jokes: In Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, a mean girl from Rayelle's school calls her "Raybies" and then laughs.
- Masquerade Enforcer: Michaela was washed up on a beach during a hurricane. By the time she got back to the ocean, she'd breathed so much air that her ability to breathe water was impaired. The Mermish Council, who were currently in charge of the undersea government, decided that the risk of her being washed up again and spotted by humans was too great. They ordered her to become a human, a slow process that involves living in a tidal pool for weeks and breathing different combinations of air and water.
- Mermanity Ensues: Because Jade is half-human, she can turn from a human to a mermaid and back again in a few seconds by breathing water or air.
- Mistaken for Insane: The book on mermaids includes an article from 1908 about a man who tried to jump off a cliff into the ocean. After he was "rescued," he said he was a merman who was trying to return to the ocean. He was taken to a mental hospital, where he was drugged and electrocuted and spent the rest of his life in a catatonic state.
- Mommy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: In Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels, Jade learns that Bridget, the owner of Bridget's Diner, is a mermaid. She has a teenage son named Reese who lives in the ocean. Jade thinks Bridget must have been a terrible parent for abandoning her son, until she learns that Bridget was born with a tail defect called scaliosis, which by the time Reese was born made it impossible for her to swim. Being unable to swim is a death sentence for a mer, so the Mermish Council gave her permission to go on land and take a human form, but they didn't grant that permission to Reese. Bridget was forced to either leave Reese or die.
- Never Found the Body: Michaela "drowned" last summer in Talisman Lake, which is connected to the ocean by a canal and a series of locks. Her body was never found. Jade's dad doesn't understand how a mermaid could have drowned. It turns out that Talisman Lake is used as a prison by the Mermish Council. Two of the inmates dragged Michaela underwater and held her there until her legs turned into a tail. She has spent the last year trying to escape to the ocean so she can find the tidal pool and transform back.
- Noodle Incident: In Real Mermaids Don't Need High Heels, Serena starts attending human school with Jade. She suffers a number of mishaps during her first week of school, including an "episode with the slushie machine" that we don't learn the details of.
- Painful Transformation: When Jade's legs turn into a tail it doesn't feel like anything, but when her tail turns into legs it's excruciatingly painful and makes her feel like her skin is on fire. Having her lower half immersed in water helps.
- Plane Awful Flight: In Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, the Baxters fly to the Bahamas for Dalrymple and Michaela's wedding. Jade discovers once the plane is in the air that she's afraid of flying. All the turbulence doesn't help. Neither do the toddler in the seat behind her who keeps hitting her headrest and the person who's reclined the seat in front of her all the way back.
- Portmanteau Couple Name: In-universe example. Serena's parents are named Finalin and Medora. When she starts attending human school, her legal name becomes Serena Finora.
- Pretending to Be One's Own Relative: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Michaela is finally reunited with her husband and daughter. She's still Legally Dead, so she pretends to be her sister Natasha. She gets a pixie cut and dyes her previously dark hair blonde.
- Puberty Superpower: Jade turns into a mermaid for the first time four hours after getting her period.
- Saving the Orphanage: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Jade, Luke, Cori, and Chelse start a campaign called Butterflies vs. Boutiques to stop an expansion of the Port Toulouse Mall. Chelse thinks it's about protecting the monarch butterflies that are often seen in the construction area, but the other three have a different motive: the expansion will involve filling in the tidal pool where Mers transform into humans, and where Jade's mom is currently living. In the end, the protagonists find proof that Mr. Chamberlain, who owns the construction company, didn't get a proper environmental assessment, and he's forced to change his plans. By that point, Jade's mom is safely on land.
- Signature Scent: In her human life, Michaela smelled like her favorite shampoo, Peachtree Pro-vitamin.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: Mermish speech is on the same frequency as dolphin language. Dolphins find the sound highly unpleasant and avoid mer pods whenever possible. But in Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, Jade discovers that because of her human ancestry, dolphins can tolerate her mer voice and are even willing to talk to her. Their language turns out to be mostly mutually intelligible with Mermish.
- Spin the Bottle: Three years ago, Jade was playing spin-the-bottle at a friend's eleventh birthday party. She tripped over the bottle, collided face-to-face with Luke Martin, and cut his forehead with her braces. He still has the scar.
- Tears of Joy: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Jade cries from happiness when she sees that dozens of people have shown up for the Butterflies vs. Boutiques protest.
- They Would Cut You Up: Jade's dad warns her not to tell anyone that she's a mermaid because she might be experimented on.
- Threatening Shark: Jade spends most of Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells afraid that a shark will attack her. Her worries come true late in the book, when she's swimming along the seafloor with a heavy backpack and a tiger shark grabs the backpack and starts shaking her. Luckily for her, a pod of heroic dolphins hear her ringing for help and start ramming into the shark, chasing it off.
- Tragic Dropout: Dillon dropped out of school because his mom wanted him to make more money.
- Troubled Fetal Position: During Serena's first night on land, she hides under Jade's bed, curled up in a ball.
- Umbrella Drink: In Real Mermaids Don't Sell Seashells, Jade's dad looks forward to sipping fancy drinks with umbrellas in the Bahamas. Once the family arrives in Nassau, one of the first things he does is find a bar and have three umbrella drinks in a row.
- Underwater City: The mer pod of Port Toulouse Bay lives in a village consisting mostly of low-lying caves in an underwater valley.
- Waking Non Sequitur: In Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Cori is sleeping over at Jade's house. When Jade's dad wakes her up by accident, she says, "Is the clam in the bucket? Did the clown put the clam in the bucket?"
- Welcomed to the Masquerade: After Cori sees Jade with a tail in Real Mermaids Don't Hold Their Breath, Jade and Luke tell her everything.
