Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Mermaids and Musicians
by Diane Frank
Blue Light Press
May 2025, $20usd, 254 pages, ISBN: 978-1421836867

“Mermaids and unicorns brought wisdom and beauty to the earth during an earlier time, something the history books are too late to remember. They understood the mysteries in the core of atoms and spoke the language of the stars,” the mermaid in the title tells us at the start of the second part of Diane Frank’s enchanting and wise new novel. Significantly, while the other fifty-four short chapters of Mermaids and Musicians are related by an omniscient narrator, this chapter that introduces us to the implicit magic of the novel is in the voice of Melissa, as she is dubbed by Arianna, another important character in the story. (“It means ‘honeybee’ in Greek,” Arianna tells her.)

But Frank has already alluded to mermaids and the magic of dreams before we meet Melissa. The story opens on a young musician in the Appalachian Mountains, in Tennessee, named Daniel. He is thirty-two years old when he sets out from Memphis to start a life as a music teacher in the community on Signal Mountain. He brings with him four violins, a banjo, a viola, a cello and a variety of other string- and wind-instruments. 
Daniel’s grandmother – and Mermaids and Musicians is full of the wisdom of grandmothers, both earthly and aquatic – has already told him “that every human, like every bird and butterfly, has a soulmate.” Much of the plot of Mermaids and Musicians is about the search for that soulmate. Daniel finds his at the Mountain Opry one Friday night when he is playing his banjo and fiddle in the big red barn where the dances take place. Lucinda is a red-haired, green-eyed beauty who likewise benefits from the wisdom of her grandmother, with whom she lives on Signal Mountain. When a cardinal flies to the shoulder of a mermaid sculpture when she and Daniel are at an art gallery overlooking the Tennessee River, she feels it’s an omen.

It’s a long courtship (“Take time to build the foundation before you blow the roof off the house,” her grandma cautions), but eventually Lucinda accepts Daniel’s grandma’s ring. Their first child is a daughter, who in a dream Lucinda learns will be called Arianna. Lucinda, a painter and fabric artist, and her Grandma “made a quilt for Arianna’s wall, with dolphins, tropical fish, and a mermaid.” Both Daniel and Lucinda dream of mermaids. And when their second child is born, a son named Jeremy, in Lucinda’s dream “the mermaid showed her a vision – a boy playing the violin on a high cliff over the ocean.” This dream turns out to be prophetic.

For more than a decade the family leads an idyllic life of love and harmony and sensual delight on Signal Mountain. This introduces Frank’s other important plot element, music, which is no less magical. From their very beginning, both children are steeped in music. Arianna’s instrument is the cello, which she takes up at the age of four, and “Jeremy was born with a craving for musical instruments, especially the violin.” Like their father, they become quite skilled and inspired, and ultimately both children wind up going to Juilliard in New York and pursuing careers with orchestras. Arianna performs with a string quartet that tours the country, when she’s not at home in Anchor Bay. Like their father, the brother and sister hear music in their dreams; like their father, upon waking up, they write down their inspirations.

A cellist for over eighteen years with the Golden Gate Symphony, Diane Frank writes about music with profound authority. Her deep understanding, knowledge and love of music in all its forms is evident throughout, whether it’s dissecting the Beethoven Quartets or describing the subtle performance of vibrato on a cello or delighting in banjo and fiddle tunes at a dance where people are waltzing, clogging, dancing contras. Her lyrical style is as elusive and rousing as the music in which she luxuriates. Frank’s sensuality also extends to taste, as she describes, with exuberant specificity throughout, the foods her characters enjoy, whether it’s the herbs and vegetables, berries, bread and soups that Daniel and Lucinda and their children enjoy on Signal Mountain or, later, the seafood, chocolate chip pancakes with blueberries in California, the zucchini, eggplant, clam toast and cannolis. Mermaids and Musicians is a feast for the senses.

After Jeremy and Arianna grow up and the family moves to Anchor Bay in Mendocino County in northern California (remember Lucinda’s dream?), Jeremy and Arianna meet Melissa, the mermaid. Steeped in the magic of dreams all along, Mermaids and Musicians takes a turn for the surreal at this point. Mermaids exist! And yet, all, including Melissa, continue to seek out their soulmate.

Talk about grandmothers! Melissa has at least six, and they constantly counsel her in her dreams. She and Jeremy are mutually attracted to one another, and when she emerges from the sea, her tail and fins turn into wobbly legs. She is able to pass as a human woman. For over three years Melissa lives with Jeremy, and they ponder their future together. Are they soulmates?

How all this works out is the climax of this beguiling novel. The mystery of Arianna’s soulmate is another part of the plot that keeps readers turning the pages as she mediates between her brother and her friend Melissa. Along the way we are mesmerized by this wonderous world that Diane Frank has created, at once realistic and as magical as a fairytale. From the folksy communal life of the Appalachians to the captivating seaside world of California, Frank takes us on a magical ride, and the soundtrack – fiddle tunes, Brahms, Mahler, Dvorak, Native American chants, jazz, African-American spirituals and more – cannot be matched.

About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.