The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea (Book Review)

After binging the excellent queer pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, I actively sought out media that would fill the hole it left. In that search, I repeatedly saw The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall recommended. I’m always in a mood for pirate content, but the nonbinary representation promised in The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea was enough to get it to stand out from the crowd.

What’s it about?

Evelyn is the beautiful, wealthy, highborn daughter of Imperial nobility. Unfortunately, she’s far from a proper lady, and her parents decide that the best thing to do with her is to send her to an arranged marriage across the world at the very edge of the empire’s reach. Little does Evelyn know that the ship she boards is actually crewed by pirates who plan to overtake their passengers and sell them into slavery. Her only hope is Florian, the pirate who was assigned to protect her while onboard and with whom she has fallen in love, but who is hiding more than one secret.

What’d I think?

 I love books and movies and sitcoms about pirates. In fiction, pirates are almost always chaotically fun; they might break the rules, but it’s always the rules everyone wants to break anyway (like women have to be proper or no telling rich people how much they suck). They drink lots of rum and dress immodestly, but when it comes down to it, they’re good people who live rough and care about each other and only kill when strictly necessary. They’ve run away to sea because they have a romantic idea of the sea, or because they’re gay and fleeing homophobic society, or because they just don’t want to have to put up with The Man. This makes for very enjoyable fiction, but it’s not especially true. While it’s true that lots of pirates may have gone to sea to escape the limitations of polite society or because they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else, it’s also true that piracy was savage and violent. Tokuda-Hall does not forget that, and while she does sand down the rough edges a little in order to YA-ify the story, there is a lot of darkness and cruelty in The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea. Florian/Flora, one of our dual protagonists, may have gone in with pirates because he and his hapless brother Alfie would have starved to death if they hadn’t, but one they’re in they’re in. Flora is no innocent. She has killed on her reprehensible captain’s orders, and she has taken part in the enslavement. She doesn’t like it, but before meeting Evelyn she never protested, either, preferring to keep her head down. His position being what it is, Florian has always had to balance his morality with his self-interest. When the two options are starving to death and stealing poor children’s bread and condemning them to starve to death, it’s not much of a decision. Florian is saving money to leave the life, but she is anchored to her brother, whose softness and trauma has turned him into a drunkard with an expensive addiction. Abandon her brother or keep pirating? Flora lives an ugly life with ugly choices, and the novel does not shy away from that ugliness. 

Nor does it shy away from brutality in general. Imperialism is a major part of the novel, and major storylines stem from the cruel ways in which the empire conquered neighboring lands, stripped them of their culture, and then instilled them as lesser colonies to the Emperor. The empire in this novel is loosely inspired not only by England and America, but also by Imperialist Japan. One of the POV characters, Rake, third in importance only behind Flora and Evelyn, is old enough to remember his homeland being ravaged; the resultant grief, anger, and PTSD is his primary motivating force. A relationship to the empire is fundamental to every character in this novel. Because we spend time with the pirates, outcasts and enemies to the emperor, most of the characters have been directly harmed by this imperialism, and Tokuda-Hall leans directly into that.

The novel is split into three parts that directly correspond to the title. I very much like this idea in theory, but it’s slightly less effective in practice. Specifically, the second section is less effective. Both mermaids and the sea play crucial roles in the novel even beyond their own section. Flora and particularly Evelyn’s interactions with the mermaid in part one have ripple effects that effect everything that happens to them from then on out, and the Sea is an entity whose power holds sway over everyone else in the novel. The witch, though. There’s a section in the book wherein Flora spins their wheels learning magic from a witch while Evelyn’s side of the story picks up. The witch intimates that Flora is somehow magically powerful and that they haven’t fully accepted themself, and cryptically references the Pirate Supreme. Even though Flora leaves supposedly having learned magic, this whole interlude feels pointless. Flora uses the magic she learns maybe once, to accomplish something she could have done without powers (albeit with a little more difficulty), and it feels very unnecessary, like Flora just needed something to do while Evelyn uncovered betrayals and conspiracy. After finishing The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea I found out that it does have a planned sequel. It is highly possible that Xenobia and her magic will become relevant then, but I went into The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea thinking that it was a standalone and because it resolves as if it were a standalone, it feels like a dangling thread that didn’t need to be there in the first place.    

On the whole, I really liked The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea. However, I was perturbed by the way it ultimately decided to handle Flora/Florian’s gender identity. I read this book almost entirely because it promises a nonbinary pirate. While it is true that we get that—the Pirate Supreme uses they/them pronouns—Flora reads more like a woman in disguise as a man. That’s a classic pirate trope, and seeing how a woman in disguise makes her way in a man’s world is an interesting story. It’s not the one I wanted to read, though, and it’s not the one I thought I had signed on to read. Flora takes on Florian as an identity because it keeps her safe, and she proves herself as a man to her fellow pirates. Even though Florian is a part of her, she thinks of him as separate for most of the book. Her POV chapters are all identified for “Flora” even when she is operating as Florian for all or most of them, and when the novel describes her actions, she/her pronouns are used exclusively. He and him are only used by the other pirates (and by Evelyn, before she knows). Later in the novel, Flora seems to come to a better understanding of herself as a person who is neither male nor female, but both. Evelyn asks Flora which pronouns she prefers and Flora answers, “I guess it doesn’t really matter. Any of them feel true.” There are maybe two instances of Flora being called Florian in this chapter, but it is the only time. Even in the chapters that follow, after Flora has accepted themself fully, she and her are the only pronouns used. I wish that Tokuda-Hall had approached this differently, perhaps by integrating he/him and they/them pronouns for Florian more regularly (like I did in this review), or by using “Florian” occasionally as a chapter heading. Narratively, in the style of writing, we are told that Florian is a front for Flora, and Flora is the true identity. The few lines we get to the contrary aren’t enough to counteract that. If Flora had indicated that she still preferred she/her pronouns but still identified as enby, that would have helped. I also would have been fine if Florian was a front and Flora was a woman in disguise; we need more good sapphic books, too! I just felt like there was some mixed messaging with Flora’s identity: the text of the novel told me she was nonbinary, but the structure of it validated only her womanhood.

It’s hard to know if I’ll read The Siren, the Song, and the Spy when it’s released. While I did like The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea and I feel that a sequel has the opportunity to fix a few of the minor flaws—namely the witch’s noninvolvement and Florian’s jumbled gender identity—I feel that the novel works well as a standalone. The ending has echoes of The Little Mermaid and has a beautiful and bittersweet finality about it. I don’t know Tokuda-Hall well enough as a writer to know if she would improve upon that or if she would have to undo what worked well to make a sequel, and my gut instinct is to let The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea continue to live in my mind as a standalone.

What’s the verdict?

If you love queer pirates and don’t want your stories to shy away from the dark, violent realities of life even in fantasy, this is a great book for you. I wouldn’t necessarily point to it as fantastic genderfluid rep, as I had some issues with it, but it was still pretty good (and since there’s not much enby rep to be found, good-not-great rep still counts for a lot!). While the romance is a little too insta-lovey to be fully shippable, the adventure is still high-stakes and exciting, and overall it is noteworthy for its diversity; anytime a fantasy novel takes its cultural cues from beyond America and England, that’s a huge point in its favor and that alone makes it worth the read.

What’s next?

If you’re looking for more Asian-inspired queer pirates, read A Clash of Steel by C.B. Lee immediately. It’s a retelling of Treasure Island, but with lesbians and featuring Zheng Yi Sao, arguably history’s most successful pirate (who happened to be a Chinese woman!)

The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee is another super fun YA fantasy novel about queer female pirates (the primary heroine is asexual!). It’s actually the second in the Montague Siblings series, and the first—The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue—is a good rec for this one as well! It’s about a wealthy young man whose parents don’t approve of him; he’s sent on a grand tour to get all his debauchery out before returning home to respectability, but it doesn’t go as planned because he’s helplessly in love with his best friend and also doesn’t have any impulse control.

A Gathering of Shadows, the second book in V.E. Schwab’s Darker Shade trilogy, also has an iconic queer pirate privateer. 

Watch Our Flag Means Death! It’s an amazing, hilarious show. And it has a badass nonbinary pirate in Jim, who at first appears to be following that classic woman-in-disguise trope before casually/iconically coming out (“I am not a fucking mermaid”). 

Want some books with genderfluid and nonbinary leads? I’ve found a few:

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe is an incredible graphic novel memoir. You know it’s good because it ended up on the top of the ALA’s list of most banned books in 2021.

Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee has an important secondary character who spends the novel discovering eir identity. This novel is an adorable romance, and the wholehearted, wholesome acceptance of this character’s gender identity, despite the long and bumpy journey to it, is a major highlight.   

Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin is a contemporary novel about a nonbinary teenager. Like The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea it can get very dark and needs a trigger warning for sexual assault and transphobia.

Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series has a badass genderfluid secondary character who is heroic in their own right but also serves as the titular character’s love interest. 

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston has a major character undergo a gender identity journey in the background. It’s not the novel’s main storyline—or even that character’s main storyline—but it is wonderful.

All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’Donoghue also has a nonbinary love interest. It’s exciting that so many enbies get to be seen as desireable, but in listing them out I am definitely seeing a pattern that they’re not necessarily the leads. Hopefully I’ll find some more soon!