Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew are off to the beach—and sleuthing for ghosts! Nancy and her friends are headed for the shores of Cape Mermaid, New Jersey, where they are hoping to spend a fun-filled week. But as soon as they arrive at an old inn on the beach, strange things start to happen—spooky noises, a message for help, and a possible ghost sighting. Could the rumored ghost of Cape Mermaid actually exist? Or is there more to the story than meets the eye? It’s up to the Clue Crew to solve the mystery!

When he falls in love with a beautiful mermaid who drifts in too close to shore, a young Irish fisherman snatches up her shimmering cape knowing that as long as he has it the mermaid can never leave him.

Illustrations and rhyming text introduce some of the mermaids who, for centuries, have lived in a city beneath the Mississippi River, visiting New Orleans each year on Mardi Gras.

In the nineteenth-century United States, jokes, comic anecdotes, and bons mots about the Pacific Islands and Pacific Islanders tried to make the faraway and unfamiliar either understandable or completely incomprehensible (i.e., “other”) to American readers. A Laughable Empire examines this substantial archival corpus, attempting to make sense of nineteenth-century American humor about Hawai‘i and the rest of the Pacific world. Todd Nathan Thompson collects and interprets these comic, sometimes racist depictions of Pacific culture in nineteenth-century American print culture. Drawing on an archive of almanac and periodical humor, sea yarns, jest books, and literary comedy, Thompson demonstrates how jokes and humor functioned sometimes in the service of and sometimes in resistance to US imperial ambitions. Thompson also includes Indigenous voices and jokes lampooning Americans and their customs to show how humor served as an important cultural contact zone between the United States and the Pacific world. He considers how nineteenth-century Americans and Pacific Islanders alike used humor to employ stereotypes or to question them, to “other” the unknown or to interrogate, laughingly, the process by which “othering” occurs and is disseminated. Incisive and detailed, A Laughable Empire documents American humor about Pacific geography, food, dress, speech, and customs. Thompson sheds new light not only on nineteenth-century America’s imperial ambitions but also on its deep anxieties.

In an exuberant picture book, a glimpse of costumed mermaids leaves one boy flooded with wonder and ready to dazzle the world. While riding the subway home from the pool with his abuela one day, Julián notices three women spectacularly dressed up. Their hair billows in brilliant hues, their dresses end in fishtails, and their joy fills the train car. When Julián gets home, daydreaming of the magic he’s seen, all he can think about is dressing up just like the ladies in his own fabulous mermaid costume: a butter-yellow curtain for his tail, the fronds of a potted fern for his headdress. But what will Abuela think about the mess he makes — and even more importantly, what will she think about how Julián sees himself? Mesmerizing and full of heart, Jessica Love’s author-illustrator debut is a jubilant picture of self-love and a radiant celebration of individuality.

The beauty of this book is that each poem is accompanied by a full-page beautiful illustration. The adult narrator will read the poem to the child, and the child will be able to identify in the image everything that is in the poem. Each poem is about a mermaid, but the beginning of the book concerns how the mermaids are instructed by a red octopus to fulfill their mermaid duties. Girls will love the book and that is the targeted audience.

As the sun sets on the ocean the sky turns pink then purple, the spring becomes the summer, and a celebration begins. Mermaids arrive ready to greet the new season by playing, feasting, and dancing in the high tide. Mark Jones' pastel illustrations capture an enchanting and mysterious world sure to delight the imagination of all readers.