thistlechaser | Book #53 of 2024: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall.

Quick synopsis: Flora pretends to be a boy (Florian) on the most evil pirate ship. She falls in love with a noble girl, Lady Evelyn, and the two have adventures.

Brief opinion: Book one, I read the second book The Siren, the Song, and the Spy (reviewed by me here) first. This book was a much "smaller" story. Two girls, living in a hard world, in love. The second book was epic, world-spanning, so many characters. That being said, I still enjoyed this book -- I read it in a day. I just liked the second book a lot more more.

Plot: Set on a Fantasy-Earth. Fantasy-Japan is the evil empire. Flora and her brother are street kids in the empire's biggest city. Starving. Freezing. To try to survive, they earn a place on the most evil pirate ship on the sea (better than starving to death, right?).

Once on board, the brother is raped repeatedly by the most evil pirate on the evil ship. The sister is abused in non-sexual ways.

Elsewhere in the city, Evelyn isn't loved or wanted by her parents. She's a disappointment for many reasons, including that she's "twisted" (a lesbian). So the parents ship her off to the other side of the world in an arranged marriage.

She makes the trip on the most evil pirate ship on the sea (which pretends to be a passenger vessel so the captain can then sell the passengers into slavery). For no real visible reason, Flora/Florian falls in love with Evelyn and decides she can't let her be sold.

The two escape the ship, the Sea (a sentient being in this world) takes pity on them and brings them safely to the closest shore... which just happens to be the city where Evelyn's evil, evil husband-to-be is (in book 2 we learn he's a literal psychopath).

Flora trains to be a witch while Evelyn overhears Evil McEvil Husband's plans and escapes him, then there's a big sea battle and the two girls have a happily ever after that's less of a deus ex machina ending than the second book's was.

Writing/editing: The writing was good, fast reading, very exciting, hard to put down. But like book 2, it felt really heavy-handed about the statements it was trying to make.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: While I liked the story, Flora/Florian and Evelyn were just so boring as main characters. Book 2 was full of such great, exciting characters! While this book was just... spunky genderfluid girl and beautiful (fantasy-)Japanese girl are in love.

Also, it seemed like Flora/Florian's brother (the one who repeatedly got raped) got the really short end of things story-wise. I feel like the author didn't like him maybe? He's the one I felt most bad about in the entire book where everyone other than the two main characters basically had the worst time ever.

I wish I had read these books in the right order, because now I want to read the second one again, knowing what I know from the first book.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 4 stars, liked.