2022 read #13: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall.

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

359 pages

Published 2020

Read from April 19 to April 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Gay pirates are having a bit of a cultural moment. Over the last few weeks I've been privileged to observe the emergence of the Our Flag Means Death fandom in real time. I get the vibe that a bunch of other queer pirate media has been released in recent years, too, but alas, I haven't been reading much in recent years. I can say that the best segment of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue involved pirates, and one of my favorite stories in Queer Blades, the LGBTQIA2+ fantasy adventure anthology I edited, involves sapphic pirates.

So I really wanted to like this book. I think the basic outline of its plot holds promise. The two main characters are interesting. The world -- while only thinly sketched -- has potential.

But overall, it was disappointing and under-baked. Tokuda-Hall's prose rarely rises above utilitarian. Outside of Flora/Florian and Evelyn, most of the characters feel like stick-figures, barely sketched in, lacking motivation or substance. The plot reads like an outline, with the characters forced into making the choices they make because the outline demanded it, not because the choices make sense in-character. Given the way the book ends (and this is a tiny spoiler), the entire witchcraft subplot feels completely superfluous, something left over from a previous draft. 

I won't say I dislike this book by any means. In my completely arbitrary rating system, 2.5 is essentially neutral -- an average book, not one I'd recommend but not one I regret reading. But I do feel like The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea could have been so much more. Especially given the caliber of some of the names Tokuda-Hall drops as early readers in her acknowledgements.