YA standalone about pirates, mermaids, the Sea as an entity, witches, imperialism, slavery, misogyny, arranged marriage, torture, …

A story about love between two women from very different sides of the tracks, the love of a mother for her children, the love of two siblings, the love between a found family, the love of profit. But it fell very flat.

There is Evelyn, a high born woman sailing towards her arranged marriage. She’s leaving behind her servant/lover/best friend without a care about the girl’s future. There is no love between her and her parents, she feels like a pawn in their game.

There is Flora/Florian, a black orphan, who, together with her brother, became a member of the crew of the Dove out of desperation. She turns a blind eye on the captain’s plans to sell the passengers into slavery once they are far enough from their port of departure.

The world-building is a Japan-inspired imperialistic world. There is lots of commentary about colonialism and misogyny.

Witchcraft is introduced in the second part of the book. It was intriguing, but there are only a few instances where magic is used.

The Sea as a mother caring for her children and plotting revenge on the men who kill her offspring is as interesting as the witchcraft element. It’s elaborated on similarly, too.

The romance between Evelyn and Florian is a set thing, soulmates, match made in heaven, why elaborate and show how they fall for each other? I didn’t buy the insta-love. Further, their love for each other is supposed to be what the whole plot rotates about, but we hardly see the two of them have meaningful dialogue.

The middle of the book was rather boring, compared to the interesting and well-paced first part and the rushed ending. Not all issues were resolved.

I wanted to like this book very much. It had a lot of potential. The execution though disappointed me.

2.5/5 Goodreads stars (that’s 3 stars then)

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for providing me with a copy of this book.

This... was a wild ride. There was darkness and light and hate and love and I adored every second I read this book.

First of all, the story is so brilliantly structured. Without wanting to spoil too much, it is fantastic how the events always relate to the part they are set in. Especially because we start out on a pirate ship and we end on a pirate ship and it just feels as thought the story has come full circle. Absolute master piece.

The different POV's are everything. I love when books offer different POV's, but often it's difficult to keep the voices apart. Even if I would have put the book down for a day in the middle of a chapter, I would have immediately known whose voice I was reading and that was phenomenal.

I immediately fell in love with the characters (well, the important ones anyway) and they were so loveable but flawed and it is everything I need from a well rounded character and story. The diversity - not only racial but also sexuality and gender wise was great and I loved seeing a non-binary/female love story in this.

I just can implore everyone to read this book. It is absolutely brilliant and if you like fantasy, you will adore this with all your heart. There are some darker moments in here but hey, it's a story about pirates. What do we expect?

This book couldn't be anything other but five stars for me.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I devoured it in one evening, and my thoughts keep returning to it over a day later. Tokuda-Hall’s writing is beautiful, really enrapturing from the first minute, building a very real world for us to reside in with these characters.

The characters themselves are wonderful. Flawed, diverse and resilient; the perfect sort of heroes. I was absolutely blown away by the representation of queer and gender nonconforming characters, particularly by a very real conversation about the pronouns used by one particular character. I am even more pleased that they are not the only character whose pronouns are discussed.

However, there were some aspects of the book which did grind with me. For one, this didn’t seem to fit into any sort of aged category; not quite old enough to be teenage, not quite young enough for middle grade. I absolutely adore its unapologetic realness and rawness, but I couldn’t help but feel that it fluctuated between childish tales and incredibly mature themes.

My second gripe is that the last part of the book felt rushed. The beginning of the book is slow and thoughtful, really drawn out and the world built beautifully, but in the last quarter of the book everything changes. Characters appear then disappear seemingly without much impact (the witch in particular puzzled me a little), a relationship blooms without all that much build up, and all of their immediate problems are fixed. It felt slightly off kilter, at odds with the rest of the book.

But other than the fact that it doesn’t always mesh flawlessly, it was wonderful. As I said, the first part of the book is beautiful. I don’t usually enjoy books with multiple points of view, but I felt Tokuda-Hall wrote each of them realistically, with each of them being distinctly different with different thought styles.

The story itself is one of love and adventure, with colonialism and sexism making important appearances, giving the world an in-depth history and real-world element. The ending is in no way predictable, which is pleasantly surprising, and it leaves the reader a little sad, but in no way displeased. As previously mentioned, not everything gels together all that well, but ignoring the minor detours, the plot as a whole is fun and exciting with just the right amount of intrigue.

In essence, the storytelling and the description are wildly refreshing, as well as the frequent “interludes”, which take nothing from the pace of the story itself. It was lyrical and poetic and so very different to so many books I have read in the genre, I really would recommend giving it a read if you are at all interested in books for young people.

I didn’t get too far into this because of the way the arc is set out. There are so many letters etc missing from the lines and it just isn’t set out properly, the part that I read was amazing in terms of story and I’m convinced it’s going to be a 4/5* but the layout of the arc is horrific so I couldn’t finish it.

The Mermaid, The Witch and The Sea is a pirate adventure on the high seas! I really loved the world building, especially the magic, but unfortunately the rest fell a bit flat.

The main characters Flora and Evelyn weren't actually very interesting, and the romance felt very fast. I really wanted to love them together but instead I found myself skimming their interactions.

Most of the book was quite slow so I found it a challenge to push through. It's such a shame though, since the events of the book had the potential to be really good!

I received a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This review has been posted to Goodreads and will be submitted to Amazon after release.

The elevator book for this pitch was great - pirates and folklore galore. But in practise it didn't live up to my hopes, the plot seemed a little to hectic and aimless and the characters felt a little overworked. It wasn't until nearly 3/4 of the way through when I started to really become immersed in the narrative.

Blog post live August 20th 2020.

Trigger Warnings: homophobia, off-screen rape, slavery, violence, loss of limb, death.

Reading this book was a genuinely stressful experience. Every single chapter I read, something new and terrifying happened to Evelyn and Flora. I would have thought I’d get sick of constant plot twists, but they’re executed so artfully that I just couldn’t look away from it. Stopping at our buddy read chapters each day was torture. The balance between emotional moments and exciting plot moments was perfect, honestly, and the POV characters were really well split. Each jump had me eager to find out happened to them next, and I adored the interludes from the sea herself. A lot happens in this book, which makes me think that this will be even better on the reread, and I’ll definitely come back to it in a few months to give it another read and it’ll probably emotionally wreck me even more than it did the first time.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea is gloriously queer. I read a lot of queer books but I was still giddy at this one just because so many characters were non-cis. I was curious how a genderfluid main character would be portrayed without seeming gimmicky, but it felt very authentic to me and the moment where Flora realised that they could be Flora and Florian both was incredibly satisfying. However, I will point out that as a cis-woman, this isn’t my expertise and I hope that genderfluid and non-binary reviewers were also given the opportunity to read this book as I’d love to read their opinions on the rep. The sapphic romance was just perfection and I loved the way that Evelyn felt towards Flora/Florian. Their relationship felt so authentic and I’m so glad that we didn’t have to have any kind of gender/sexuality crisis from Evelyn as a response to Flora’s coming out.

The aesthetic of this book is just incredible and I’m obsessed with it. I would literally die for the Pirate Supreme without any hesitation. Xenobia is cool as all hell. The Sea herself might be my favourite character in the book. The characters in The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea are all heavily flawed and I cannot stress enough how that’s my favourite thing in books. Perfection is boring and overrated. Maggie Tokuda-Hall created a full cast of complex characters and I went through the emotional wringer falling in and out of love with them from page to page as their actions and motivations were exposed. I honestly cannot wait to see what she writes next because her character work is everything I’ve been looking for.

What I really liked about this book was the characters that told the story. They were very interesting and I liked the relationships between them. Though I really wish I could know more about the captain as well as Rake

The concept of this book was great - pirates, the Sea as a power that demands payment, witches, gender fluid characters. But it was slow, dull and messy. As other reviewers have said, Flora/Florian is a boy on board ship for practical reasons, rather than specifically identifying as a boy, and if I've misread that then it's because it isn't explored in any depth. The most interesting character by far is the Imperial lady assassin, the witch barely has any characterisation at all. It felt like it should be a relatively fast-paced adventure but it didn't make it there.

The world that's created sounds fascinating, but it's under-explored and feels as though it's perhaps better developed in the writer's imagination than it is in this story. I'd be happy to revisit the world, but I honestly didn't really care about the characters - in fact, they were more interesting at the start of the story than they were at the end (except for Rake). Some people may well love it, I'm not one of them.

Sometimes you come across a book that just makes you think, maybe I shouldn’t be reading this genre anymore. Well that book, for me, is The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea (the genre being YA fantasy, of course).

But this, unlike the other ones I’ve suffered through this year, was a little different. There was more than just boredom happening. So strap in, this could get a bit like a rant.

First let me start with some positives. I really loved the lore of this world, namely the idea of the sea being something to pay tithe to (and as such, Rake’s storyline was by far the most interesting aspect of the book to me), and the story of the mermaid who falls in love with a witch and the sea cursing them both. But I really wish those had played larger roles in the plot than they did.

Instead though, I got something that was boring and aimless.

Primarily that aimlessness came from there not seeming to be an overarching arc to the story, at least not until the very end. The individual parts had their own arcs, sure, and that would have been fine if I could see where it was going. But I couldn’t and, as such, it felt very like the plot was going nowhere (and, unsurprisingly, I got bored). Not to mention a good chunk of the plot seemed to have no point in and of itself. Like how Flora learns magic, but for what purpose? The eponymous witch is only there to actually teach her said magic, and plays no other role in the plot. I said above I wanted the lore to feature more prominently than it did - this is exactly where I could have done with that happening.

And then there’s the instalove. Good Lord I haven’t read one so bad in a while. Like I do get that, for plot purposes (what little there is), Flora and Evelyn need to be at least friends with one another by the end of the first part. But there’s friends and then there’s goddamn instalove and I just cannot stand the latter. Not to mention the whole vibe of how Evelyn is “not like other rich girls”. Please, spare me.

But now we come to the kicker of this book. The genderfluid rep (with the caveat this is not an ownvoices review, so please take what I’m saying with a healthy pinch of salt).

Throughout the book, it never feels as though Flora identifies as a man through anything other than necessity. The idea that a woman is not strong enough to be on a pirate ship (which, also, brings me to a minor point about the misogyny and homophobia in this world like. I’m so tired of fantasy worlds, where you can make all sorts up, and yet cannot imagine a world where these bigotries don’t exist). It never feels as though Florian is anything but a mask, or a completely separate individual.

This is particularly evident in how Flora speaks about Florian (as if he were a mask). And in how, in Flora’s POV, only she/her pronouns are ever used. In fact, he/him pronouns are only used in outsiders’ POVs. So, yeah, pronouns don’t equal gender, and all, but there’s no real talk of the latter.

And then there are these quotes:

“They do prefer women.” This time, Flora said nothing. The spell of safety Florian cast over her life was slipping, and yet she did not seem to be a female anymore, either. The loss stung. She was neither, it seemed. Or at least, she didn't reap the benefit of either.

Hearing Florian aloud dragged her back to the Dove, back to her life on the sea with the Nameless Captain and Rake. And Alfie. “That’s not my name,” she said finally. “Isn’t it?” Xenobia held Flora’s eyes, unblinking. [...] “There are those who are neither man nor woman. Those who were born and called the wrong gender and must reshape their story for those around them. But you. You’re something else. You’re whatever is safe. Both, maybe, but not neither. Or interchangeable.”

In the first, it’s the reference to Florian being “a spell of safety” and Flora “[not reaping] the benefit of either”. In the second, it’s Flora’s response of “that’s not my name”, and Xenobia’s comment that “you’re whatever is safe”.

None of this, to me, rings true of genderfluidity. Genderfluid people are not “whatever is safe”. I would be surprised if they thought about “reap[ing] the benefit of either”. And the way Flora’s first instinct is to say Florian isn’t her name does not feel like she actually identifies with him in anyway.

And yes, I could be persuaded this is less a story of a character who knows they are genderfluid, and more one of them realising they are, but you just need to take a look at the reviews to see that very few people seem to be picking Flora’s genderfluidity up at all.

Add onto this the talk of “holding two identities in her heart” following this talk with Xenobia (again, I wouldn’t have thought genderfluidity meant two separate identities), still only using she/her pronouns in her POV, and the bit at the end where the pronouns flip-flop back and forth based on the name another character uses to refer to Flora?

It just feels like a mess in all.

Imaginative and full-hearted. I wish book like this had existed when I was still trying to find me. There's adventure, romance, hard-headedness and quick-witted courtiers. There's a mermaid like you have never seen before in these kind of books.

I really enjoyed this book!
The writing style was great, and I was immediately sucked into the story. What I enjoyed most was the character development, though. I really enjoyed how the characters grew throughout the story.
The plot fell a little flat for me, sadly. Hence the reason for giving it three stars. I had anticipated a little more action and a little more pirate-life, but alas.

A tortuous novel, not for the feint hearted...
True pirates and not the ones who have been romanticised in films, with elements of darkness and violence throughout.
A ship sets sail full of aristocrats being demanding and self important, not knowing their true fate. They are to be stripped of all belonging and sold as slaves.
Flora/Florian, is a gender fluid character who falls in love with Evelyn, an aristocrat. Their relationship is interesting and at times, feels shallow and lacking depth.
With issues of race and slavery featured, I would be interested to read other reviews.

It is an dark and vengeful book and for some, it will be intensely and brilliantly received. As a primary school librarian, I couldn't purchase this for the school but would recommend it for older readers.

3.5 stars.

What first drew me to this book was the premise of mermaids and pirates. I'm a simple gal, when I see those two things in a story, I just have to read it. And while there were parts of this book I really did enjoy, there were other parts that I didn’t.

The story follows Evelyn, an Imperial lady, and Flora/Florian, a black, gender fluid, pirate. Evelyn is being sent away to be married and is travelling on the ship that Flora/Florian is a crew member on. The ship acts as a passenger ship for the rich Imperials, but is actually a slave ship, and the passengers’ possession are stolen and they are sold as slaves. I felt a bit uncomfortable about the slavery aspect of the book, and I’d be interested to hear readers from the black community thoughts on having a black character in the crew of a slave ship. I also felt like the issue of slavery was only in the book as a plot device, and to cause problems for Evelyn, rather than given the full weight and implications that a topic such as slavery deserves.
I did like both Evelyn and Flora/Florian as characters, although I felt like Evelyn was a far more developed character. We knew Flora/Florian was black, but that was pretty much it, there was little mention of the culture of the place s/he was born and grew up in. I was also left with lots of questions about the world the book was set in. We’re told about the ruling Imperial class from Evelyn’s POV but very little about the other places, cultures, and ethnicities in the book. However, it was very interesting to read about the impacts that imperialism had on different characters, and how it had affected them.

I'm not a big fan of insta-love, and felt like the relationship between Evelyn and Flora/Florian was lacking in depth. There are times when they're thinking about how much they love each other and I'm left questioning why. What is it you like about this person? Do you even have anything in common? I also feel that this book would benefit from having Evelyn be older. She’s fifteen, nearly sixteen, and yet she acts much older. I find it hard to get into a story where the protagonist is so young and found the way she acted to be unbelievable, considering she's very much still a child. Even if she was seventeen, nearly eighteen, I would have been more on board. There are also themes in the book that I think would be unsuitable for younger readers who would perhaps be more likely to pick it up with such a young protagonist.

The plot was fast-paced, but at times I was left confused. The two halves of the book were so wildly different that it left me baffled as to what was going on at times. At around the halfway point all these characters and plot devices were introduced all at once, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around what was going on. There was an introduction of a witch and magic, but no explanation about the rules of magic, and whether just anyone could learn or not. This book is aimed at YA and teens, and yet I'm an adult reader and was frequently confused about what was going on; I honestly couldn’t tell you what the deal was with the Pirate Supreme, Nameless Captain, and the Imperial forces. Whose side was I supposed to be on? Any of them?

You would also think that in a book called The Mermaid, The Witch And The Sea, there would be far more mermaids involved, but I was super disappointed. I don’t want to spoil anything, but even by the end I felt like mermaids were sadly lacking in the story. However, I did enjoy the Sea being a sort of vengeful character intent on protecting those it felt deserved it. There were also some short stories told to Flora/Florian that were a highlight for me, and I would have happily read an entire book of them.
Overall, I really enjoyed the representation of LGBTQ characters, and I really liked the writing style as it kept the plot moving along at a good pace. However during the second half of the book I was just perplexed about what was happening, and felt there was too much going on.

I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Mermaid, The Witch and The Sea is a brilliant pirate story which completely abandons the romantic idea of good looking pirates à la Johnny Depp. Instead, it's closer to the realistic and historical representation of pirates. This story not only contains a black gender-fluid main character and sapphic relationships, but also explores the consequences and cruelties of colonialism.

Coming from a well-established family, Evelyn is an Imperial. Of course in this misogynistic world, Evelyn has no choice but to get married to someone she doesn’t love or even know, forced by her father who tries to save the finances of the family. And so she is literally shipped, with her own casket filled with few of her belongings into an unknown and savage land. Flora/Florian has only her brother left. She was able to disguise herself as Florian and join the pirates crew of the Dove in order to at least secure a place to sleep and eat for both, and some certainty of survival.

The Dove’s crew operates as a normal passenger ship for the rich cast, the Imperials, but in reality they sell the passengers as slaves and strip them of their possessions. Evelyn gets on board the Dove where she meets Florian. Flora/Florian eventually develops strong feelings for Evelyn, even if she is an Imperial and represents everything that Florian couldn’t have in life. Flora/Florian has to decide between saving Evelyn by abandoning the Dove’s crew, and protecting the brother by continuing with their brutalities.

For the most part this plot really kept me on the edge. In the middle of the story the pace slows down a bit with the introduction of new POVs but it quickly picks up its fast pace again. As I mentioned before, if you are thinking of reading a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of story, this is not the type of book. There are cruelsome scenes, as well as hints of sexual assault and violence. While the social caste structure of this world is pretty clear – with Imperials on top – I felt the ethnic and racial representation of the various cultures was a bit weak. Many elements of the Imperial’s culture are introduced in the story through Evelyn’s POV, which clearly takes a lot from the Japanese culture, with their architecture, kimonos, and tatamis. We don’t know much about Flora/Florian apart from the fact that s/he is black, and the writer doesn’t take time to further explore other parts of this world. There was another group of people described as “pink” but it doesn’t go further than that.

I was a bit confused but I guess it leaves room for the writer to explore with a follow-up story, and there is still so much to say about these pirates. I really enjoyed reading this story and for once I wasn’t annoyed by the insta-romance. It just felt right. Even if it left me a bit confused about who populates this world, she still created something with so much potential and filled this story with other fascinating short witch tales and other super cool stuff that I am dying to talk about, but I don’t want to spoil the story. In conclusion, I can’t wait to read more from this writer.

This sounded so good but it left me a little disappointed. It follows a sea pirate named Flora/Florian and an aristocratic lady named Evelyn whose paths merge on the ship. They fall in love and have to deal with mermaids and witches.
I loved the representation in the books too, there is a sapphic main character and a black gender fluid main character. I’m not sure how I feel about the black main character working on a slave ship which just felt wrong to me. Hopefully own voice reviewers can review it. I did enjoy the magic in the book and how the sea was a vengeful force, I really did like the darker aspects of the book.
I have to say I didn’t enjoy the romance and it was a big part of the story. It was a little insta love and I didn’t really see them as working well as a couple.
I also couldn’t connect to the characters which also made me a little disappointed. The characters didn’t seem likeable to me.
Overall I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I thought I would.