The Fisher Girl

A sea to challenge. A secret to bring to the surface. And a girl who learns to navigate her fear.

Fourteen-year-old Scilla fishes for swordfish on her uncle’s boat, a felucca called the Cariddi. Her father died at sea two years earlier, and her mother left Marettimo island when Scilla was small, disappearing without trace.  One day, Scilla and Mansur, the Cariddi’s lanzaturi, catch a gigantic swordfish. Stuck in its throat, Scilla finds a pendant with a photo of a woman holding a baby. The woman is her mother, and the baby is Scilla herself. This leads her to believe that her mother actually drowned and the pendant sank to the bottom of the sea.  The mystery deepens when Scilla discovers that the pendant was made just two months earlier, in a New York jeweller’s. How is that possible? And then, where is her mother? Could she have returned to the island recently?  A journey to the Big Apple solves the mystery, but places Scilla at a crossroads: will she start a new life in America with her newly found mother, or return to her roots on the little island? A new life full of wealth and prospects, or her link to the sea and her childhood friends? 

• A coming-of-age story intertwining the magic of the sea and the urgent need to protect it from human exploitation; the love for a boy who is not what he seems, and the need for self-determination in a prejudiced world.