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Sanna is a mermaid — half seavish and half human. She’s never known her mother, and no one remembers enough to tell her, because the night of her birth a sea-witch cast a spell that made Sanna’s people — including her landish mother — forget how and where she was born. All Sanna has now are snatches of what her father manages to remember before he forgets again. Like Lisabet. Her mother’s name was Lisabet.
Now Sanna is 16. She’s become something of an outsider in the seavish matriarchy — a part of the flok but not fully one of them — so she is determined to find her mother and learn who she is and what happened once and for all.
Apprenticing herself to the sea-witch, Sanna learns the magic of making and unmaking, and with a new pair of legs and a quest to complete for her teacher, she follows a clue that leads her ashore on the Thirty-Seven Dark Islands. But the land is a prison she did not expect, and soon Sanna finds herself among a village of hardscrabble people hungry for miracles and trapped within the walls of a cold castle belonging to a baroness with a magic of her own.
Mermaid Moon is a lyrical story set in a hard, medieval world. At first, I thought it might be a Little Mermaid retelling, and while it does share some aspects of the fairy tale — a mermaid who gets a pair of legs and an evil witch — the similarities end there. Still, despite the fascinating premise, the strong beginning, and the short chapters, I quickly found myself loosing interest. The story itself set a slow pace that didn’t really pick up until the last fourth of the book. It did feature some common positive aspects: a girl discovers who she is and finds her confidence, people learn to hope again, characters learn to forgive and put the past behind them. Overall, though, I wasn’t really into this.
Rated: High. Includes very little mild language and a few references to someone being a “donkey.” Sexual content is high. Mermaids are topless and bare breasts are mentioned frequently, as well as other anatomy that differs from humans. Being a matriarchal system, same-sex attraction and mating are common among mermaids. There is also a reference to sex between humans (to the point of sounding like emotionless, textbook “birds and bees” talk that leaves nothing to the imagination), as well as references to sex between human and marreminder, and to sailors raping mermaids. In one instance, a mermaid “aligns” herself with a naked man. There are several scenes featuring nudity. One scene explores the concept of kissing with tongue. The book also contains magical violence, drownings, deaths, and a witch who harvests time from men, women, and children (an unknown process) and who hangs their bones on her wall.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
