The Seafarer's Kiss

The Seafarer’s Kiss, Julia Ember, 214 pages

Ersel has long wanted to explore, to see what lies beyond the ice shelf in which she and her fellow mermaids live. However, her childhood best friend, who she’d planned to run away with, has joined the king’s guard and increasingly buys in to the patriarchal mores of their society. When Ersel finds Ragna, a shipwrecked human woman, she is again presented with a choice: to flee and start a new life, or to stand up against the king’s tyranny. Either way, she’ll need to deal with Loki, the god of mischief, and Loki’s deals can never be trusted.

I went into this book with high expectations, which were pretty much immediately dashed, but then by the end of the book I was enjoying myself again. So this has been kind of a roller coaster. The writing is clumsy at times – Ember seems to forget that mermaids live underwater and structures parts of their society inconsistently with that (for instance, their dining hall). And although I expected a retelling of The Little Mermaid, I did not expect the references to the Disney version, which took me out of the fiction and reminded me strongly of the TV show Once Upon a Time. That being said, I think the book gets better as it goes, and I really liked the ending.