The Book Wench

Note – I received a digital advanced reading copy of this novel from Edelweiss+ in exchange for an honest review.

On land, Eppie will never be anything more than the outcast girl who kissed the grocer’s daughter. But beneath the water’s surface lies a future and a society she could never have imagined. Stolen from the shore, she is transformed. Eppie is stronger, swifter—and hungrier. Human flesh smells like heaven on earth, and Eppie is ravenous. 

She has become a monster of the deep—a mermaid.

Despite the horror of her new appetites, Eppie learns to love this strange second life. The mermaid colony is mesmerizing and Eppie’s new sisters are fiercely loyal. And when Eppie meets Marie, a stunningly beautiful mermaid with a past as shadowed as her raven-black scales, she finds she no longer needs to resist the desires that were denied to her on land. 

But dark sails are on the horizon. The mermaid hunters are coming, armed with cannons and Biblical wrath. Eppie must decide whether to protect the new, monstrous family she’s found or leave it all behind for a chance to live above the waves once again.

This book absolutely enraptured me from the very beginning. I haven’t read very many mermaid-centric fantasies and was quite excited to, forgive the pun, dive into the book as soon as possible. What I read actually astonished me.

From the very beginning it is obvious that English is an exquisitely talented writer. It must come with the name because her command of the English language is immense. The descriptions in the book are absolutely gorgeous, so rich and piquant. I could imagine vividly everything I read as if the book were unfolding before my very eyes. She is truly talented. I even told friends that she is one of those authors that is just meant to write.

While I have not read much mermaid-centric fiction, I am familiar with a lot of mermaid lore as I have done a lot of research into the mythology of mermaids for my own writing. English’s lore for her mermaids is extremely unique and interesting. I was so curious to see how mermaids came to be and how they were able to transform humans into beings like themselves. It was terribly fascinating to see the mythos that she developed.

I want to warn readers that the romance in this story is a slow burn. Don’t go expecting love to pop up immediately. The romance was intriguing to me until the moment it became a little toxic. I say this fully understanding that there are extenuating circumstances to the situation and that it was very deftly welded together with a hefty helping of religious trauma from multiple sources (you’ll understand when you get there). The toxic part of the relationship is literally the only thing that gave me pause with regard to this book. There were some slight whiffs of the misunderstanding/miscommunication trope which somewhat irked me until I realized the truth of what was going on and then I realized that I missed something as a reader. But, again, that toxicity is borne of something much deeper and much more complicated than surface-level toxicity. Think I just startle too quickly at a relationship that looks not quite perfect and expect the worst before I allow myself to understand the nuances of what was really going on.

I truly enjoyed the characters that I read, especially Eppie and her close family members, both on land and under the sea. English did a really great job at making me care about a majority of the characters and giving everyone a (sorry about this pun too) depth to them that just kept giving. Writers who create a version of a non-human species can sometimes succumb to the pitfalls of accidentally making the side characters in said species run together and seem the same, but English avoided this completely. Everyone was different and had their own multifaceted characterization and it was so easy to keep everyone separated into their proper compartments despite the number of characters. At no point did I confuse any one character for another.

If I am being quite honest, I think the only thing that genuinely gets me is that there was not a single shark in the entire novel. I felt like at least one should have cropped up somewhere in the endless oceanic setting. Other than that I was, and am, enamored by the book and the setting and I cannot wait to see what happens in the next book.