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Seven Tears into the Sea
By Terri Farley
Simon Pulse, 2005. 279 pages.
In Seven Tears into the Sea Terri Farley takes a mainstay of Celtic lore and transplants it to the present day in coastal northern California. Selkie legends, in which seals shed their skins and come to shore in human form, have been the inspiration for many works; Johns Sayles’s film The Secret of Roan Inish is probably the most prominent of these in recent years.
Farley’s novel begins with ten-year-old Gwen Cook, who lives with her parents in a cottage near the sea, encountering a young man late at night on the beach. In her dreamy, sleepwalking state, Gwen is not sure whom she has encountered, nor does she understand the words he leaves her with:
Beckon the sea, I’ll come to thee . . . .
Shed seven tears, perchance seven years.
Her family soon leaves the area, but Gwen returns to their cottage seven years later to help with her grandmother’s bed and breakfast for the summer. The week in which she returns is filled with events that climax with the celebration of Midsummer Night. Most significant, however, is Gwen’s meeting with a young man named Jesse. Jesse lives in no particular place, and no one has any knowledge of where he is from.
Gwen and Jesse fall in love, and the course of the novel is taken up with the workings out of their relationship in the context of Gwen’s family’s place in the community, local controversies over the environment, and the repulsive behavior of local young toughs with whom Gwen had grown up during the first ten years of her life.
Jesse, of course, is the main mystery. Gwen has no doubt as to her feelings about him, but just who is he, and where has he come from? What will the nature of their relationship be? Farley drops hints by way of Nana, Gwen’s grandmother, who acts as the keeper and teller of local lore. Gwen herself knows the selkie tales and engages in her own speculation. The novel, and the answer to question of Jesse’s identity, plays out with attention to the nature and demands of friendship, love, and the life of a community.
The reader will suspect that she or he has figured the novel out long before it ends, but Seven Tears into the Sea is too rich to be that simple or predictable. Farley’s portrait of a particular love in a particular place takes unexpected turns that will keep the pages turning as well until the final pages when the meaning of the riddle of the sevens becomes clear, just when it should.
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