Here's the official description of the novel below, which was published in March. Friday.Actor Tobey Maguire will produce Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale through his Material Pictures banner, along with Jenno Topping. Brett will give a presentation that includes a drawing demonstration when she visits The BookMark in Neptune Beach at 5 p.m. Meet the author and illustrator when she makes a stop on her national book tour. Brett gets inspiration for books from researching architecture, clothing, historical customs, people and landscapes wherever they go. Hearne is a bass player for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and they travel together all over the world.

In the summer, she and her husband, Joseph Hearne, move to a home near Tanglewood, Mass., in the Berkshire Mountains. The detail in my work helps to convince me, and I hope others as well, that such places might be real.”īrett lives in a coastal town in Massachusetts, close to where she grew up. On her website,, she writes: “Now I try to recreate that feeling of believing that the imaginary place I’m drawing really exists. An aquarist and curator introduced Brett to Sy, a giant Pacific female octopus.īrett decided to be an illustrator when she was a child. illustrations that frame the pages and tell another story or foreshadow the main plot in her books.Īfter her trip to Japan, which provided the initial inspiration for her latest children’s book, Brett visited the New England Aquarium in Boston. Now the setting and the clothes were Japanese.”īrett researches her source material assiduously, and the results appear not only in the main illustrations but inside her trademarked border, or keyhole. When I worried out loud that the octopuses looked alien, my young friend Alma suggested they wear hats. I admired the Okinawan houses and made the octopus house like the island ones. “It wasn’t until I returned home and was musing over what creatures would take the place of the three bears in my under-the-sea Goldilocks story that it dawned on me that octopuses, intelligent and mischievous, would be just right. “A baby octopus waved its little arms at me when I glimpsed it on some coral while in the ocean off the island of Okinawa when I was visiting my daughter and her husband,” Brett states on the book jacket in a note to her readers. In a twist on the classic tale, shock turns to happiness as Kiniro proffers a special gift before her final escape.Īnd now for the story behind the story. When the octopus family returns, a shocked Baby finds Kiniro asleep in her bed.

Instead of a fair-haired girl, a raven-haired mermaid does the testing of the food, the chairs and finally the beds.

Instead of three bears, Brett’s version features three octopuses who have built a perfectly inviting home.

Mermaid a twist on the classic tale