Paperback- I so wanted to love this book. It has all the ingredients needed to make me swoon (gothic horror/ rich and deeply embedded folklore/ sultry, poetic prose/ a strong female main character/ feminism) but somehow it fell… flat.

There’s no real plot; it’s all very character driven, one thing happening and then leading to the next thing happening and so on. Characters and plot points pop up and fall away quickly as if the writer had initially intended to make a much longer book.

There’s lots of lush nods to Celtic folklore which was really cool, but none of it integrated particularly well and absolutely none of it was necessary for the plot- the gothic fairytale was a backdrop to what was essentially boiled down to being a historical fiction about a girl who is forced to be engaged to a horrible man, escapes with the help of a motley crew of throwaway characters, and then finds her long lost parents estate where she becomes embroiled in a murder mystery.

Outside of our heroine, every female character save Vivienne (from the troop) are painted as villainous and/ or pathetic; they’re all set against the main character in some way, and every single one are described as fat/ frumpy characters which makes me wonder at the authors viewpoint- why are all her ‘bad’ women depicted as fat? Why does the MC always feel the need to comment on the size/ ugliness of the women she interacts with?

I loved the writing style, it was dramatic and gritty and poetic in all the good ways, I just wish the prose
had been shorter and the plot had been fuller. (And that there was more Merfolk)