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Tales of Elemental Spirits #1

Water

robin mckinley peter dickinson

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Seven tales describe magical beings that inhabit our waters. Some are familiar mer-people; some as strange as as a golden eye in a pool at the edge of the Great Desert Kalarsham, where the mad god Geljdreth rules; or the unknowable, immense Kraken, dark beyond the darkness of the deepest ocean, who will one day rise and rule the world.

1 Prologue: The water sprite / Robin mcKinley and Peter Dickinson
2 Mermaid song / Peter Dickinson --
3 The sea-king's son / Robin McKinley --
4 Sea serpent / Peter Dickinson --
5 Water horse / Robin McKinley --
6 Kraken / Peter Dickinson --
7 A pool in the desert / Robin McKinley.

266 pages, Paperback

First published June 10,2002
Series
Tales of Elemental Spirits
Literary awards
world fantasy award, 

This edition

Format
266 pages, Paperback
Published
October 21, 2004 by Penguin Young Readers Group
ISBN
9780142402443
ASIN
0142402443
Language

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About the author

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robin mckinley

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Born in her mother's hometown of Warren, Ohio, Robin McKinley grew up an only child with a father in the United States Navy. She moved around frequently as a child and read copiously; she credits this background with the inspiration for her stories.

Her passion for reading was one of the most constant things in her childhood, so she began to remember events, places, and time periods by what books she read where. For example, she read Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book for the first time in California; The Chronicles of Narnia for the first time in New York; The Lord of the Rings for the first time in Japan; The Once and Future King for the first time in Maine. She still uses books to keep track of her life.

McKinley attended Gould Academy, a preparatory school in Bethel, Maine, and Dickinson College in 1970-1972. In 1975, she was graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin College. In 1978, her first novel, Beauty, was accepted by the first publisher she sent it to, and she began her writing career, at age 26. At the time she was living in Brunswick, Maine. Since then she has lived in Boston, on a horse farm in Eastern Massachusetts, in New York City, in Blue Hill, Maine, and now in Hampshire, England, with her husband Peter Dickinson (also a writer, and with whom she co-wrote Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits in 2001) and two lurchers (crossbred sighthounds).

Over the years she has worked as an editor and transcriber (1972-73), research assistant (1976-77), bookstore clerk (1978), teacher and counselor (1978-79), editorial assistant (1979-81), barn manager (1981-82), free-lance editor (1982-85), and full-time writer. Other than writing and reading books, she divides her time mainly between walking her "hellhounds," gardening, cooking, playing the piano, homeopathy, change ringing, and keeping her blog.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
34(34%)
4 stars
25(25%)
3 stars
41(41%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
100 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
NapoTheGuy
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I'm a huge McKinley fan; however, this is not quite her best work. She's better with the novel-length features where she has the chance to develop the world and storyline in a way that keeps the reader hooked. The clipped nature of these stories are just too short for the things she's capable of creating.
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scaps
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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6 stories from married authors RM & PD. Plus a prologue. I liked all the stories, which had a fairy tale type cadence to them. The last story I liked the least & it was the one that had a Damar reference.
It took me a while to get through that one.
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karbear
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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An interesting collection of short stories that verge on novellas. If you like longer short stories, this is a good place to look.

From the girl unwilling to follow in her grandfather's footsteps to the curse-breaking lovers, the book had a theme of redemption. That theme kept some of the stories from getting too dark and dragging the book into the realm of emo teenagers. For most of the stories, there is a balance between the unpleasant realities of the world we live in and a chance at a brighter future. It feels like the darkness makes the spark all the brighter.
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Shichio
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Curiously uneven. Dickinson and McKinley are both guilty of very weak stories (the endless and heavy-handed "Sea Serpent" and the pointless and vaguely silly "The Sea-King's Son"), but also manage to produce excellent tales (the dark "Mermaid's Song" and the far-worldly "Water Horse"). They would have been better-served by an editor not involved in their marriage, I think. By rights, I should give this collection three-and-half stars, but it ends with a wonderful story in my beloved Damar ("A Pool in the Desert"; Dickinson's third tale, "Kraken," is also quite good), so I am therefore glad to own the collection.
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Ryan777
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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downloaded from my public library, this was a very excellent anthology, only one of the stories did not please me, I just didn't get it at all, but every other one I absolutely loved.
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JRTShinigami666
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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"I believe there is no other place like it in all the wide world, though there must be other places just as strange. It is our strangeness to be a threshold between land and water; and the boundary between us is striven for, and fought over, and it shifts sometimes this way, and sometimes that."

Mermaids, krakens, and water horses, oh my! A really cool collection of stories based on an element rather than any specific creature.

"The Kraken" and "A Pool in the Desert" (bringing us back to Damar! yay!) are both fantastic. The best two stories in the whole set.
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Moris_ESPOIR
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I always get confused about what's an anthology and what's not; I'm never sure whether I should expect a collection of stories BY the people on the front cover or merely collected by and edited by them. In this case, for whatever reason, I was expecting water-themed stories simply collected by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson, though I did expect they'd include at least one of their own. I was tickled when the very first story was by them, and then thrilled when it turned out the rest of the stories were too! I haven't read much of Peter Dickinson, and I'm pretty sure I've read almost all of Robin McKinley, so I heard her voice most strongly in the stories, but otherwise, I think they make a very strong husband-and-wife story writing team. The stories, with the exception of one I had trouble following and getting into ("Sea Serpent") were well-told and engrossing. I spent a very happy afternoon reading this book.
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Temoblanks
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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01/2013 I must confess that I only read the stories by McKinley in this anthology. Peter Dickinson has just never clicked for me.

I quite enjoy all McKinley's stories, although A Pool in the Desert has never seemed like a story particularly suited to an anthology about water.

11/2017 And once again, I only read McKinley's stories. This time it struck me that the stories Water Horse and A Pool in the Desert are about girls in abusive situations, and something extraordinary must happen to free them. It's sad.
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