A few years ago I read at least part of an urban fantasy novel with a female protagonist whose boyfriend is a selkie. This is established in the first or second chapter, and she’s angsting because she knows that he’ll soon put his seal skin on and return to the ocean. I think he does before too long.
Any ideas what it might be? And if not, do you know what that messageboard where they solve book mysteries like this might be? I used to have it bookmarked, but apparently not on this computer 
Nevermind. I figured out the book. Still would like the link to that messageboard if anyone knows it, though.
What’s the book?
The first of the terrible Merry Gentry books by Laurell Hamilton, “A Kiss of Shadows”.
The real mermaids were people who used skin waders to walk between islands in Frisia. I had the link to the original story of “The Little Mermaid,” but am looking for it.
While I search,please read the story of the Battle of Warns, my last name. Though I might instead be related to the residents of Warnsdorf. half a continent and several languages away. As my great uncle said after investigating the name, “It’s really old.” And yet nobody can spell it without adding letters.
ETA: This story has the basics, though it’s Scottish. It’s also an old story, told by related people.
…Didn’t I also read recently that there is some speculation that these selkies might have a historical basis built upon the adventurous, or off course, Inuit in a kayak. It is not unikely that seafaring inuit or northern peoples of Russia, Greenland, and/or Canada, those cultures just below the arctic circle, might have possibly made landfall in Ireland.
So, would that mean that the Aboriginals/Inuit of The North Americas, possibly Greenland- were the first to discover the Old World, far before the Spanish discovered the “Americas” in the 1400’s?
The website is BookSleuth on Abebooks:
http://forums.abebooks.com/abesleuthcom
Those people are scary good.
I’m embarrassed that I knew this almost instantly when I read the OP. I only ever read the first two books… so they were all pretty terrible, huh? Have you read them all?
Ok, I just checked on Amazon and they are up to book 8 in the series! That is crazy. I hate that I have this morbid urge to read them just to see how bad they really are - I had to stop reading L.K. Hamilton’s books in 2002 because I couldn’t suffer the cheesy animal porn any longer, but I do sort of want to know what happens. Restarting now might by fatal to the literary part of my brain, but I am such a sucker for bad supernatural fiction.
well, then you wouldn’t want to read the rest of the gentry saga. things get really wild and crazy in the pregnancy race. you won’t believe how many fathers are involved in the dna pool of the gentlings!
Aha, that was actually the first book that came to mind but I was hoping it was a different one that might be interesting to check out…
Last I left off they were still Underhill and wandering deeper or something. Dealing with Night Hags and whats his face of the tentacles but just before the Seelie ball (which was to be in the next book, but I never bothered going on).
I stopped after the third when she still wasn’t pregnant.
The only thing you would need to prove my theory is the matching Inuit/Indian myth. The sword for this sheath, so to speak. One would only need to find a masculine shapeshifting tale within the Northern (arctic) regions. Seals to the pics, what to the Inuit?
I think you seriously overstate your case here. You’d need a lot more than that. You might start with, say, some sort of logical reason why this myth wold need a highly implausible historical basis instead of being one of the many stories that were told and that evolved as they moved from culture to culture. Selkies are part of a long tradition of similar tales. The seal part is about the least important part of that particular story and is likely just a convenient localization.
The first step toward finding the origin of old stories is to find the oldest version of the story, which is not only basically impossible but something most people cooking up wild theories to try to explain such tales never even attempt.