LITTLE MERMAID, THE

I love it! This book takes me back to the movie with Ariel and her friends. I read it for fun. Ariel has always been my favorite Disney Princess.

Teaches children life lessons in a fun entertaining way

Novels are of course unable to match the filmmaker's power over our emotions via sight, sound, and song. But the novelist has her own tangible advantages over the filmmaker, with clear insight into characters' thoughts and emotions! These Disney junior novelizations eschew the novelist's advantages and settle for merely being very accurate descriptions of what the film is portraying. This results in a very bland experience compared to the film. But actually, we are taking advantage of the blandness of this novelization as a gentle introduction to the story for our 5-year-old daughter, who is getting a lot of Little Mermaid on her kindergarten radar but whom we don't want to traumatize with a too-early screen introduction to killer sharks and to Ursula, one of the most evil and frightening of the Disney bad-guys.

I purchased this as one of several books for children at Christmas. It looked good, but I haven't hearda reply from the recipient. I feel that she liked it.

My daughter loves the Junior Novelizations of her favorite movies and The Little Mermaid is one of her favorites!

A great book for fans of The Little Mermaid of all ages. Follows the classic Disney film exactly. It was a fun book to read.

Loved it

Great book for kids. Text is a good size and makes it an easy read.

Very faithful novelization of the movie. Nearly every scene is written and about 90% of the dialogue is preserved.If you want more depth to the story with insightful previously unknown details then you’ll be disappointed. The paragraphs are a simple-yet-well-written scenes with typical-but-well-chosen words. As such, this book will seem somewhat superficial to anyone who knows the movie well enough. However, it is fun to basically ‘watch’ this movie in your head as you read.Some things which may be unavoidable, but forgivable, are (1) the lack of music (2) difference of characterisation.(1) Those meaningful and engrossing musical scenes are near-trivially summarized into underwhelming-even-forgetful paragraphs. As this is a book and not the movie, this is obviously unavoidable but it really surprised me how much was missing. As such, I would almost recommend reading the book until any musical number, watch the musical number, and then return to the book... btw, there are no lyrics so maybe printing them out and folding them inside?(2) Some characterisation and scene description will not coincide with your fan interpretation. However, as how I said before the writing is simple and typical, this will only a few sentences/words so nothing major. It's nothing that will cause major disagreement as the book is safe (read 'faithful') way; if you like the movie you'll be virtually guaranteed to like the book-So, should you buy?If it’s for a child who likes The Little Mermaid, I can see the appeal. It’s a fun way to ‘watch’ the movie without actually having the movie and I suppose it’s a great way to introduce a child to reading by having them read something familiar and that they are bound to like. If TLM is a favourite, this book might be too?If it’s for an adult who is merely interested, then maybe pass on this book because reading the script online is about the same experience. If it’s for an adult fan then it’s fun to see how someone has put your movie into words and it’s kinda cool for the novelty.4/5 stars.

my niece loves to read to this book will be great

Excellent read for my young granddaughter

Never a truer line spoken than during lockdown. I have been watching the Little Mermaid since I was young, and it's still up there with my favourite Disney movies. There are a great many retellings of this, but if you just want to stick to the Disney movie (and not the horrific original story that it was based on), this is the one to go for.It's a fairly simplistic novelization, there are no additional scenes or weird characters popping up. All the characters you will see on screen and are well described. It's 122 pages, so longer than the last Disney novelization I read, but still a relatively quick read. The songs are obviously cut, and not shoehorned in awkwardly, unlike in some novelizations I have read.This will make for a great bedtime story for the kiddies, and is suitable for slightly older children as well. If this gives them a fascination for all things mermaid related, there are plenty of other books out there (searching for "Little Mermaid retellings" will bring up plenty), suitable for a range of ages. This should keep them amused for the time being though, and will be a well loved book in your child's collection. ​