I grew up in the Disney generation when the story of The Little Mermaid captured my heart. Many years later I visited Copenhagen to see the famous Little Mermaid statue myself – a bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen, depicting an anguished mermaid becoming human, her lonely expression pained with the choice of being stuck between the two worlds of conformity and desire. It’s an anguish that most humans tap into at some point in their life, and this is what has given the story such a long-standing sense of fascination over the years. This month, I revisited the story anew, via Nen and the Lonely Fishermen. We’ve seen a run of fairytale retellings in picturebooks in recent years, but Ian Eagleton and James Mayhew’s modern adaptation of The Little Mermaid is highly original in its rendering of that original tale of anguish, identity and the pursuit of dreams…