I checked this out on a whim, and I don’t regret it!! (Maybe I’ll impulse buy the companion novel?) It was a cute queerplatonic Little Mermaid retelling, with a sprinkle of polyamory towards the end. Bernard and Maris’s relationship was so sweet, I loved the understanding they showed each other, and it’s just nice to see platonic love in a story like this?!?! Maris’s understanding of love, and it being different from the amanormativity and allonormativity of the rest of her human(“tall-crab”) world was not only validated, but was also written in a way where her asexuality/aromanticism wasn’t a result of her being a mermaid and was just part of her as a person(?)/character. 

While not told in the most poetic of prose, I did also like Maris’s internal conflict surrounding her deal with the witch. She finds a lot of joy in “simple” human things, and there was a quiet beauty in her holding onto that, as well as her friendship with the prince, when she was still finding out where in the human world she fits into and if she needed to give up herself. 

And I also liked how language was talked about, even if that’s a smaller theme! Maris is mute for most of the book(not for the traditional Little Mermaid reason, she still has her tongue and voice intact), so she communicates through sign language for a bulk of it, and there are a couple of lines about the slight language barrier she has when trying to learn different human terms. (Arguably, her self-expression through dance can be included in this, too.)

I wish this had been a little longer so we could see more of Maris’s human firsts, and some of the other characters in the kingdom!! And what’s going on with her sisters now? Most of the focus is on her, Bernard and Asha, so even if there are other characters it still *feels* like a very small cast. I also understand that some people might not like the emoticon use, although I thought it worked as an occasional tone tag and a way to characterize Maris’s naïveté. My last issue is that this sort of has the “Turtle Under Ice” problem where this feels more like chopped-up writing than poetry at times, but the sample I saw for the companion novel seemed to do this much less.

Honestly aromantic rep is lacking so if you want to check this out for something simple and cut that *isn’t* just arophobia and questioning for 260 pages, I’d say to give it a shot.