I can’t say this started off great, because it wasn’t the best. But the whole of the first chapter was good, I loved its ending.

And then it all went downhill. The Clive Barker-esque “saints”, the esoteric nature of the hunt and the resurrection… every promising notion introduced in the first chapter was torn down with the uninspired and cliche plotline of “let’s take down the bad guys and free these victims” we’re all familiar from action movies. This comparison to action movies turned out to be all the more apt, as the book is ultimately inconsequential, our “superheroes” with extraordinary characteristics survive time and time again because they’re extraordinary. YAWN. Double yawn because apparently this is a love story. YIKES.

I listened to the audiobook (the narrator was good!) but apparently it lacks a story that’s present in the ebook! I read that story too, and it only made things worse. The narrative tone is completely different than that present throughout the book. It jumps around, it makes the book all the more self-contradictory.

The author and the characters clearly suffer from amnesia, as they do things they’ve previously spoken against, like the doctor who was enraged by the surgeon-saints returning the soul to the reanimated body, but was so happy when revived exactly this way by the narrator-mermaid.

I’d ask “what was the motivation” but the two main characters lack motivation in everything they do anyway. They’re not believable as characters, and their undying love story that somehow develops within 3 days (the additional story tells us they’ve known each other longer, but the point stands) is even more implausible.

Speaking of the doctor, there’s absolutely no reason they’re called a plague doctor, because they’re not??? If the author clearly had no idea what a *plague* doctor is, why didn’t the editor bother checking what it is???

Anyway, as if the ending with the “our protagonist survives because she has magical powers” wasn’t bad enough, there was an epilogue that just cheapened things further down to a clumsy children’s book too. In case you weren’t nauseated enough to discover this was essentially a superhero romance.

There are more issues with the book, such as the mermaid whose tongue was cut off somehow being familiar with the taste of earth spices, and worse yet, the absolute confusion concerning the setting. The setting appears medieval, but we also have modern scientific terms like phenotypes. The French language exists in this universe, and the mermaid is familiar with Ragnarök and Andersen’s little mermaid story. How??? Why???? I doubt the author knows the answers either. This was just clumsy.

I’m so disappointed the book I was delighting in by the end of the first part devolved this cheaply. It could be something great, it could expand upon its feminist stance, it could certainly take the hungry female monster archetype further with more feminist messages. It could be something special. Instead it’s trash. Congrats, I guess? Because such butchering must be a feat in its own right. 

P.S. Not to mention the outright cringy parts, like why was a human-eating mermaid talking about trauma???? Such a cheap move to try to bank on trendy words used without real understanding of their meaning as legit medical terms, and quite funny when you consider which character is talking about it (yes, you guessed it, the malevolent monster!) 

P.P.S. I forgot to mention that both “proletariat” and “bourgeois” are used in this book. Do either of the author and the editor know what they mean?? Because WHAT on earth were those words doing in this book??? Spoken nonetheless by a flesh eating mermaid??? I’m begging authors to look up words they don’t know specifically, just because Google lists it as a synonym for your layman words doesn’t mean it says what you think it does. Good grief.