Below is the complete list of Alice Hoffman’s Water Tales books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Water Tales Books
About Water Tales
Alice Hoffman’s Water Tales brings together two short novels for younger readers, Aquamarine and Indigo. The books do not continue the same characters or form a conventional two-part narrative. Their connection is thematic: both combine adolescent grief, intense friendship, and the longing for another life with myths of people who belong to the water. They were originally published separately before being collected in the omnibus Water Tales: Aquamarine and Indigo.
Aquamarine follows Hailey and Claire during the final days of a summer that will end with their separation. The girls have spent years together at the Capri Beach Club, an increasingly neglected place whose empty pool and fading structures mirror the end of their shared childhood. Claire is preparing to move away with her grandparents, and neither friend knows how to accept that their familiar life is about to change.
After a violent storm, they discover a mermaid at the bottom of the club’s pool. Aquamarine has left her sisters and entered the human world in search of love, only to become trapped far from the sea. Sharp-tongued, vulnerable, and physically weakened by the August heat, she needs the girls’ help to survive. Their effort to return her to the ocean gives Hailey and Claire a purpose during a time when they feel powerless over their own approaching farewell.
Hoffman uses the mermaid less as the beginning of an elaborate fantasy world than as an emotional reflection of the girls themselves. Aquamarine has left home because of desire, while Claire is being taken from hers by circumstances she cannot control. All three confront the fact that love cannot always prevent separation. The story’s magic remains intimate and matter-of-fact, emerging within an abandoned summer landscape rather than through complex supernatural rules.
Indigo moves to Oak Grove, a dry town still haunted by a catastrophic flood. Water is treated with suspicion by most residents, but brothers Trevor and Eli McGill are irresistibly drawn to it. Known as Trout and Eel, they possess webbed fingers and toes, move with unusual ease in water, and dream of reaching the sea. Their differences make them outsiders in a community that would rather forget its watery past.
Their closest friend, Martha Glimmer, is also living with loss. Her mother has died, her father has withdrawn into grief, and home no longer feels like a secure place. Martha joins Trout and Eel when their desire to escape becomes a journey away from Oak Grove. What appears to be a flight from unhappy circumstances gradually becomes a movement toward identity, memory, and the recognition of where each child truly belongs.
The two stories approach transformation differently. Aquamarine is built around helping a magical visitor return home, while Indigo follows children discovering that their own strangeness may point them toward home rather than away from it. Both place water at the boundary between ordinary life and possibility. It carries danger and past sorrow, but it also represents freedom, connection, and an identity that cannot be permanently suppressed.
Friendship provides the emotional foundation of both books. Hailey and Claire must understand that distance does not erase what they have shared, while Martha, Trout, and Eel find courage through their loyalty to one another. Adults are often absorbed by grief, fear, or practical decisions, leaving the young characters to interpret changes they did not choose.
Because the novels are independent, either can be read first without causing confusion. Publication order nevertheless preserves Hoffman’s movement from a seaside farewell in Aquamarine to the deeper questions of origin and belonging in Indigo. The collected Water Tales edition presents them as companion pieces: spare modern fables in which loss is real, magic is quietly possible, and the pull of home can be as persistent as the sea.