WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON, my first merman/human romance!

WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON
VENESSA VIDA KELLEY
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In Coney Island, true love rises to the surface. With lush illustrations and buoyant prose, Venessa Vida Kelley forges an unforgettable New York fairytale.

Benigno “Benny” Caldera knows an orphaned Boricua blacksmith in 1910s New York City can’t call himself an artist. But the ironwork tank he creates for famed Coney Island playground, Luna Park, astounds the eccentric sideshow proprietor who commissioned it. He invites Benny to join the show’s eclectic cast and share in their shocking secret: the tank will cage their newest exhibit, a live merman stolen from the salty banks of the East River.

More than a mythic marvel, Benny soon comes to know the merman Río as a kindred spirit, wise and more compassionate than any human he’s ever met. Despite their different worlds, what begins as a friendship of necessity deepens to love, leading Benny’s heart into uncharted waters where he can no longer ignore the agonizing truth of Río’s captivity—and his own.

Releasing Río could mean losing his found family, his new home, and his soulmate forever. Yet Benny’s courageous choice may just reveal a love strong enough to free them both.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Give the author your most intent awareness as you read this statement of her purpose in writing this wonderful (if just slightly too YA-inflected, bye half-star!) illustrated novel.

The character of Benny is, from the start, someone I loved. His self-talk is laced with Spanish, which I find pleasant. I know lots of y'all don't like "foreign" words in your reading, but there aren't a lot of better ways to get you to think about how Othering works, how much it costs. If *you* don't want to make minimal efforts to grasp another's thoughts if they happen not to be in English, why on Earth should they make any effort for you?

Moving on.

The idea of the story is finding True Love is awakening to the belovèd's essential commonality with you as you understand yourself.

Riding the exciting, brightly lit, antigravity-simulating speeding circle to nowhere

Discovering that commonality is often a matter of luck, of being the right place...and in the right receptive state...relative to the belovèd. Benny has the unfathomable good luck to be exactly where his belovèd needs him to be, to possess (through coping with his own exoticized, colonialism-imposed identity) the precise skills necessary to make his belovèd free from horrifying, degrading circumstances, and the right life experiences and wounds and battlescars to know what this degradation really is, both inside and out.

It's a novel, y'all. Of course he does.

The funny thing about degradation is it's never univalent. It degrades the powerful to use their power this way, makes them and their ideology wrong in fundamental ways. It uplifts the degraded into positions of being the focus of the powerful's imaginations, of being the means by which the powerful define their power. It creates a bond and a camaraderie, an essential amount of community and connection among those being subjected to it.

No one you love is too heavy to carry

Degradation contains the seeds of its own destruction. Remember that. I assure you the powerful do. It is the source of divide-and-conquer tactics.

Benny and Río, his merlove, are in that powerful position of being too weak to elicit a violent response from their oppressors. They're the ones who must exert force to accomplish their goals, so it pays to be under the radar. Their love blossoms over the accustomed obstacles of the Hurt/comfort subgenre of romance. It does so even more powerfully than most because Río is not human and cannot live in a human world without a LOT of devoted infrastructure.

I'll spell it out for some of our more entrenched worldview-havers: This is more than an exploration of gay men in love and building their own world across serious cultural boundaries. If that's as far as you've seen, you're correct. But "if he could see inside my dreams and see himself there" is the early stop on this train. This is also a metaphorical exploration of transgender reality in our world. It's never been easier to be trans; it's never been harder to be part of the overculture, because now that same easier existence thanks to a crude but improving infrastructure means They can see you. It's a distorted view, but you're no longer invisible to them.

To find a mate you have to be visible

But what a beautiful, Technicolor dream world awaits!