Greyling by Jane Yolen is about a fisherman and his wife who want a child. One day, the fisherman goes fishing and finds a seal that he takes back home in hopes of adopting it. The wife realizes that this seal is actually a mythical creature called a selkie. The wife decides to keep it and never let it go back into the ocean. After a few years and the selkie has grown up, there is a terrible storm and the fisherman is swept into the sea. The wife begs the folks to save him but no one does. Finally, the selkie goes and saves the fisherman. He doesn't come back but he manages to still save the fisherman. The fisherman and his wife still sometimes see the seal at sea but everyone thinks he is dead. This book raises questions about choices and teaches us about not expressing your feelings too much, don’t keep what is not yours, and when making a tough decision it might feel like there is no right choice afterwards.
Expressing your unhappiness may help you relieve or gain support at first. However, constantly complaining will bother and drain the energy of your friends and close ones. The fisherman at first was also unhappy that they had no child but overtime, the constant weeping and complaining caused him to try and not show his want for a child because he knows this will add on to his wifes crying. The wife's stubbornness about keeping the selkie also contradicted the fisherman's feelings about it but since the wife was so set on keeping the seal, he just went with it. The wife also kept on complaining which didn’t help anything and annoyed the fisherman greatly. Over-expressing yourself can cause even people who think they understand you well to question your actions or even change their own. While showing your feelings can help you progress and deal with life, overreacting can have detrimental effects on you and the people who are close to you.
It is wrong to try to keep things that don’t belong to you or raise something against their natural instinct or habit. You should instead help it find its family back but don’t keep it or think of it as your own. The fisherman saw the seal but although he knew he shouldn’t take it away from where it lived, he did and brought it back home. His wife was overjoyed but later on, the fisherman almost dies and causes great sorrow for the wife added on that the selkie also left her. Her decision to keep the selkie had more of a detrimental effect than a beneficial one. Grayling has his own family but since the wife stole him and kept him, he never got to really remember them and probably wants to go back to the sea. Even if taking things might seem easy and good at the start, over time, you will realize how things have changed after you did this bad action. Stealing things is not good for anyone, the children or animals that are getting stolen and the person who is stealing will always have to deal with something that they could’ve avoided.
When making a tough choice between two things that both really matter to you, you have to choose the one that is right but you will still lose someone you love. Tough situations can be hard to overcome and at the end, you might think you have no options indeed. The fisherman was in trouble down in the rough ocean but no one wanted to save him or could. The wife of the fisherman wanted someone to save him but only his son volunteered but she didn’t want him to go. She knew that if he went, he would never return but the selkie still went and her husband was saved but she lost her adopted son who she loved very much. These two choices could have ended very differently but at the end, someone else chose the choice for her. Two completely different choices can have very intense effects afterwards but if you don’t know what to do, someone will step up and do it for you.
Greyling by Jane Yolen is a very heartfelt book that inspires us about choices we can choose in our life. Sometimes you will have the opportunity to make the right one like not overly expressing your feelings or not keeping things not belong to you. However, when making a tough decision it might feel like there are no options afterwards. Expressing yourself too much can lead to other people disagreeing with you and not showing their feelings because they might be scared of making your feelings stronger which will be annoying. Keeping what was originally not yours can lead to bad consequences but if you just leave it alone, then you can live your normal life without any incidents. When making a tough decision, both of these choices may seem wrong, but in the end you will have to choose one or someone will do it for you and on in life. This book seems simple but it actually teaches us very deep lessons that might help us at times.
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