Life Inside a Legend: Review of Julie Salmon Kelleher’s The Sea-Glass Shore

Genevieve Williams Under Review:The Sea-Glass Shore. Julie Salmon Kelleher. Forest Avenue Press, September 2026. The selkie legend is common knowledge: beings who shapeshift between human and seal, by doffing or donning their sealskin. Take the skin, the selkie-wife story goes, and the selkie is bound to land, and to the man (it’s always a man) who took it. But she will yearn for the sea, and if she finds her skin she will return to the water, abandoning her husband and any children they might have had in the meantime. The Sea-Glass Shore subverts this narrative from the outset. The meet cute is on one of those gray, pebbly beaches ubiquitous to the Pacific Northwest. Jack is the man in this setup, an archivist by trade who, after considerable wandering, has returned to the town of his youth. There he meets Rona, who has a Little Mermaid-esque curiosity about life on land. Jack immediately twigs to Rona’s nature. Almost as quickly, he declares that he will not take her sealskin from…