When seventeen-year-old Juniper and her activist father are taking pictures of an oil spill on the beach to document the damage to the environment, June is shocked to discover three live mermaids. Two die on the spot. June and her father rush the third to the Sea Mammal Rescue Center to be cared for by Dr. Schneider and his handsome intern Carter Crowe. But once word gets out about the mermaid's existence, the press, Affron Oil representatives, Alpha Bitch Regina, and June's best friend Haley all want to use her for their own purposes.
The books in the series:
- Cry of the Sea (2014)
- Whisper of the Woods (2015)
- Echo of the Cliffs (2017)
The Juniper Sawfeather trilogy contains examples of:
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: At the end of Echo of the Cliffs, the mermaids drag Jolon out past Fuca Pillar, where his spirit finally departs. The waterfall of tears dries up. June catches the last of the water in a bottle. She takes it back to the reservation and uses it to water the tree, reuniting Isu with her brother. That allows him to ascend as well, leaving an ordinary cedar tree behind. Amelia leaves the tree and takes on human form and has just enough time to say goodbye to her brothers before she, too, dissolves and vanishes.
- Bridal Carry: In Whisper of the Woods, Carter carries June in his arms from the base of the magic tree back to camp after June is finally lowered to the ground, exhausted, dehydrated, and frostbitten.
- Cave Behind the Falls: Near Cape Flattery is a small, hidden waterfall with no apparent source that pours saltwater into an inlet below. According to legend, a woman was transformed into the waterfall after the death of the man she loved and weeps a constant stream of tears. Behind the waterfall is a cave that looks shallow from above the surface, but has an underwater tunnel that leads to the chamber where Jolon lives.
- Ecocidal Antagonist: Affron Oil, which has ad campaigns that insist that the corporation cares about protecting the environment, but the narrative shows that they have no interest in spending money on anything that would actually contribute to helping the environment. In fact, their ships have polluted beaches along the west coast and were responsible for the oil spill that killed two mermaids at the beginning of the first book. Furthermore, they are contributing to the masquerade regarding mermaid life and similar, because the public discovery of such sentient life would prevent Affron Oil from getting away with their polluting acts.
- Fantasy-Forbidding Father: June's parents are adamant that she go to Washington State, major in environmental studies, and become a lawyer like her mom. June wants to go to college in San Diego to get away from her parents and study marine biology so she can work with animals.
- Forced Transformation: A human who is held under the waterfall of tears for too long will be transformed into an orca. Juarez is held under the falls by mermaids who want revenge on humanity for polluting the ocean. After his transformation, he sickens and dies from the toxins in the water.
- Greenwashed Villainy: Affron Oil pretends to care about the environment. They have an ad campaign where they brag about saving the environment one gas station at a time. But despite the billions of dollars they make every year, they refuse to spend one penny on anything that would actually protect the environment, like retrofitting their oil tankers to comply with new regulations about the thickness of the hulls. As a result, their leaky ships pollute beaches along the entire west coast. They're responsible for the oil slick that kills two mermaids.
- Heartbreak and Ice Cream: In Whisper of the Woods, June temporarily breaks up with Carter on the same night Haley breaks up with her boyfriend Ted. June goes over to Haley's house so they can eat chocolate brownie fudge ice cream together.
- Hero with Bad Publicity: June is seen as an attention-seeking liar who invents wild tales about mermaids, and her parents are seen as irresponsible and even abusive for "encouraging" her to do things that were actually her idea, like the tree-sit.
- If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: At the end of Whisper of the Woods, June and Carter visit June's cousin Ronnie in the hospital. Ronnie tells Carter, "June doesn't have an older brother, so I'll take the role. You be good to her." June says, "Or what? Are you gonna come after him?" Ronnie says, "Yeah, I mean, not right away. But eventually."
- Landline Eavesdropping: When the Sawfeathers get a phone call at two AM, June's dad answers, but June doesn't want to wait until the call is over to find out what it's about, so she eavesdrops from a different phone. It's her mom reporting that an Affron Oil tanker is going by their region of the Washington coast so her dad can go to the beach and take pictures of the resulting oil spill.
- Line-of-Sight Name: June's father, a Chinook Indian, was born Peter Clark. When he was twelve, he and his siblings were joking about how Indians in movies always had poetic names while they were stuck with a boring one. They decided to give each other proper Indian names. Peter got his name because he saw an eagle feather and pointed it out. The others became Amelia Climbing Vine, because she climbed up a rope tied to a branch on an old-growth tree, and Nathan Trips in Brook, which was self-explanatory. Peter is the only one who kept his new name - Amelia went missing that day, and Nathan still goes by Clark.
- Maternally Challenged: June's mom is Married to the Job as a lawyer. She had no experience with children until June was born and didn't really know what to do with her. June's dad did most of the childcare. Now that June is in her late teens, she can connect with her mom a lot better than she could as a kid.
- Nonconformist Dyed Hair: In Echo of the Cliffs, Haley stops trying to fit in and instead becomes the leader of the school rebellion against Mrs. Slater and the popular kids. She cuts her hair short and gets magenta highlights.
- Not Like Other Girls: Carter tells June, "You know, there are girls that come in here all the time. They look great in their sundresses, perfect hair and makeup. They parade around and look at the tanks, but they won't even touch so much as a sea star because they're slimy.… You're different from them. You don't care how you look. You'll wake up before dawn and throw on whatever you've got 'cause you know you're going to get dirty with the fish and oil. I've never met a girl like you." June realizes Carter is trying to compliment her, but it mostly reminds her of how terrible she looks.
- Potty Emergency: A few hours into June's tree-sit in Whisper of the Woods, she realizes she has to pee. She can't think of how she's going to do that without falling 150 feet from her branch, but she's afraid she'll get hypothermia if she wets herself. Eventually she figures out how to pee over the edge of the branch.
- Rock Monster: Jolon from Echo of the Cliffs was transformed into a rock monster after murdering his two best friends. He's been trapped for centuries in and near a hidden cavern. He can move almost instantly through rock, and when he steps out into the cavern, he takes the form of a giant stone troll. But he can't go out into the open.
- Saving the Orphanage: In Whisper of the Woods, June's uncle Nathan, who lives on a Chinook reservation, wants to sell some old growth cedar trees to a logging company. June and her parents protest. It turns out that Nathan thinks the tallest tree in the forest is responsible for the disappearance of his sister Amelia, who climbed the tree and vanished when she was eighteen. He's right. Amelia has been living inside the tree for over three decades. She hasn't aged during that time. Partly inspired by Julia Butterfly Hill's memoir, June climbs about 150 feet up the tree and spends several days tree-sitting. People on the ground use a bucket to send her food and other supplies. Two men try to climb the tree to take her back down, but the tree damages their rope and forces them to descent without her. Once Nathan discovers that Amelia lives in the tree, he agrees to stop it from being logged. The tree allows June to descend.
- Secret Path: Just off the boardwalk that leads to Cape Flattery is a hidden trail through the woods that leads to the waterfall of tears. Naomi tells June and her parents where to leave the boardwalk to find the trail.
- Selkies and Wereseals: In Echo of the Cliffs, June meets her parents' friend Vanessa, who she learns is a selkie. Her late husband, Lonnie, stole her sealskin to force her to marry him and live far from the ocean. Now that Lonnie is dead, Vanessa has regained the ability to transform. She still lives most of the time as a human, but she bought a house by the sea so she can talk to other seals.
- Synchronization: In Whisper of the Woods, June becomes synchronized to the tree. When someone kicks its roots, she feels like she's been kicked in the shins, and when Nathan hits it with an axe and later a chainsaw, she feels like she's been stabbed in the stomach.
- Treants: Unlike most examples, the ancient red cedar tree on the Chinook reservation is rooted to the spot, but he can move his branches at will and form temporary knots that allow June to climb him. He refuses to let her climb down without a guarantee that he won't be cut. June later learns that he was originally a human man whose spirit was trapped inside a tree after he was murdered by a man who wanted to marry his sister. Now that most people have forgotten he used to be a human, he is desperately lonely. He took Amelia so he could have company. He wants June to live inside him, too, but he doesn't force her.
- Tyrant Takes the Helm: In Echo of the Cliffs, Mr. Mains is suspended from his position as principal of West Olympia High for missing work to talk to June during her tree-sit. His successor, former Vice Principal Mrs. Slater, is highly unpopular with both students and staff for her tyrannical behavior, which includes fining teachers whose students are caught using cell phones in class, even though the school is short on computers and some students have to use their phones to complete assignments. The only people who like her are Regina and the rest of the Student Council, who get to spend most of their time patrolling the halls and reporting people for cell phone violations. Haley and some of the other students plan a walk-out in protest. The afternoon of the planned walk-out, Mrs. Slater tries to prevent it by barring all the doors, which is a fire code violation. She is caught and fired, Regina is suspended for helping her do it, and Mr. Mains is reinstated.
- When Trees Attack: In Whisper of the Woods, Ronnie makes fun of the idea that the tree is conscious. The tree punishes him by creating a ladder of thorns to lure him into climbing twenty feet up. Then it stabs him with the thorns, knocks him to the ground with a branch, and kicks him away with its roots. Ronnie survives with multiple broken bones and a concussion.
- You Are Grounded!: In Echo of the Cliffs, June climbs down a cliff to the shore in pursuit of a mermaid. The mermaid drags her out into the ocean, almost drowning her. As punishment for endangering her life, June's parents ground her for two weeks, which means no phone, no internet, and no talking to Haley or Carter. Their house's internet connection is so spotty that June barely misses it, and it's not hard to get around the rest of her punishment. She lives next door to Haley and their rooms face each other, so they can just open their windows and talk whenever they want, and a week into her grounding she gets a job at the pet store where Carter works so they can see each other during the shift change.
