I haven’t seen blue edged pages in a very long time. It fits well with the ocean theme. The cover image feels a bit older fashioned but when I looked, the copyright is 2020.
The prologue is headed with a quote: “The moon lowers herself to draw the tide.” And then the short chapters skip back and forth between Sanna’s point of view in first person present tense narrative and the other chapters switch to third person (omniscient)?
The prologue sets the scene of a human 18 year old giving birth to a merman’s child on the shoreline, unsure if her baby will be human or a merfolk.
When the story starts, I believe Sanna is their child, now somewhat grown, who was raised under the sea and hopes to get her land legs and find her mother.
Some sort of magic gave her legs but I’m not sure how yet. And she turns white roses red by accident.
After a few chapters, I kept feeling quite removed when I left Sanna’s point of view, so I didn’t finish this novel since it seemed forced for me to try.
Here’s the blurb if you’re interested: Blood calls to blood; charm calls to charm.It is the way of the world.Come close and tell us your dreams..Sanna has been living as a mermaid — but she is only half seavish. The night of her birth, a witch cast a spell that made Sanna’s people, including her landish mother, forget how and where she was born. Now Sanna is sixteen and an outsider in the seavish flok, where women rule and mothers mean everything. She is determined to go to land and learn who she is. So she apprentices herself to the ancient witch, Sjældent, to learn the magic of making and unmaking. With a new pair of legs and a mysterious quest to complete for her teacher, she follows a clue that leads her ashore on the Thirty-Seven Dark Islands. Her fellow mermaids wait floating on the seaskin as Sanna stumbles into a wall of white roses thirsty for blood, a hardscrabble people hungry for miracles, and a baroness of fading beauty who will do anything to live forever, even at the expense of her own children.
Cassie Swindon 