Sea Witch Rising is the sequel to Sea Witch, which was a very loose retelling of The Little Mermaid with an impressive twist. Like Sea Witch, Rising is a hot mess, and, yet, also like Sea Witch, I just gotta have it. There is romance in the story but the book is not a romance. It’s about mermaid witches and an octopus witch and some human witches fighting the Germans and also patriarchy above and below the sea during WWI.
This book will be confusing unless you first read Sea Witch. It takes place fifty years after the first book and concerns twin mermaids named Runa and Alia. Alia initiates a “Little Mermaid” plot. She falls in love with a human prince, stares at a statue of him, and makes a bargain with the Sea Witch to trade her voice for legs. She has a certain amount of time to make the prince kiss her with true love’s kiss or she will turn to foam on the sea.
Runa, Alia’s sister, refuses to accept Alia’s decision and makes a different bargain with the Sea Witch, with the support of her grandmother and her other sisters. The Sea Witch asks for the sisters’ hair in return for legs for Runa. They end up with short hair, not shaved bald, and even the sisters are like, “um, that was suspiciously easy.”
The deal to save Alia from death is:
Find your sister at the waterside and give her this knife. If she does not gain the boy’s love in return by the end of her fourth day full day on land, she must plunge this knife into his heart, letting the blood drop upon her feet. When his life-force is gone and his blood has anointed her new body, she will be human for the rest of her days.”
Because of “how magic works,” there’s no “Alia gets to be a mermaid again” option. For Runa, there is. If Alia kills the prince in time, and Runa gets the princes’ ring (it was important in the last book) and the knife and also gets the prince’s blood on her own feet, and brings them to the Sea Witch within the specified time, then she can return to being a mermaid. But if she fails, then instead of dying she stays human.
So the reader assumes (at least, I did) that this is now the plot of the book – save Alia, whether through true love or through murder. And yes, Runa does try the sisterly kiss option, but apparently the Sea Witch has watched Frozen and the sisterly love kiss doesn’t count. It has to come from the prince, and it has to be Alia who kills him.
However, the plot takes a sharp turn after the first sixteen (short) chapters and becomes a war story. Suddenly it’s all about spies and blowing up U-boats. Also, the sea king (never capitalized, although Sea Witch is), who is Runa and Alia’s father, has become addicted to a flower that enhances his magical powers. That sentence that sounded less laden with innuendo in my head. Only Runa can grow the flowers, so the king is furious and going through a withdrawal that could well prove lethal for him, and he freaks out and decides that merpeople should wage war on humans now that humans have mines and U-boats. So Runa is also trying to stop a war between land and sea, and all the women in the story, of which there are many, are fighting the undersea patriarchy, and some of the humans are trying to learn magic. There’s A LOT, is what I’m saying.
This book doesn’t make much sense. The pacing is so fast that no one event gets to sink in. The characters are barely sketched in. Some of the actions result in too few consequences and others too many. All the plot devices and themes are thrown into the story willy-nilly. There are not one, but six macguffins. Ideas about agency, the nature of love, friendship, different kinds of duty, addiction, patriarchy, human politics, the nature of magic – all these things are tossed into the story but never actually explored. There’s a sort of romance between Runa and Will, but it doesn’t get time to properly develop. Sea Witch was too slow and this book is too fast.
However, the imagery is fricking amazing, as is a scene in which the Sea Witch and Runa’s grandmother face off. If mermaid stuff isn’t your catnip, then there’s no reason for you to read this. Move on. But if it is, you’ll want to at least skim. Be sure to get the imagery on land and sea, which is gorgeous, the visit of Alia’s sisters to the Witch, and the scenes between the Sea Witch and grandma. Also Will’s adoration of a stolen fancy car is pretty adorable.
And for the record, based on the stated terms of the contract, the kiss Runa gives Alia ought to count. I will argue this with the Sea Witch any day, as soon as I get done cooing over her pretty tentacles. Get your magical contracts in writing, people.
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Huh, this is nothing if not an interesting idea that seems to go utterly sideways with the insertion of the war material!
I want to know what happens in the original plot but I don’t want to read the book.