RIPPLES & WAVES: A Queer Retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid

RIPPLES & WAVES: A Queer Retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid
L.A. WITT
self-published
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Colin Everroad should be dead, but after his lobster boat founders during a violent storm off the Maine coast, he wakes up on a beach. He’s cold, but unscathed… with strange memories of a face he can’t conjure and a voice he doesn’t recognize.

No one can explain it, but a friend suggests Colin was saved by one of the mer. Except the mer don’t exist. Do they? But… that face. That voice. Someone was in the water with him. Someone saved him. If not a mer, then who? And whoever it was, Colin wants to see his face.

Lir broke protocol by rescuing a land person, but he couldn’t just let the man drown. When he disobediently resurfaces to see his beautiful land man, he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s forbidden to leave the depths again.

One clandestine visit turns into more. Soon, Colin and Lir are meeting at the shore as often as possible, and the connection between them deepens. The only problem is that neither can live in the other’s world. Or can they?

Then Lir finds a way for them to be together, but only for a little while… and at a cost. As time grows short, they have to choose: does Lir return to the sea and never see Colin again, or stay forever with the man he loves in a world that will never love them?

Ripples & Waves is a modern, queer retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: A world in which merfolk are real is clearly not our reality. It's a fairy tale, a story HC Andersen invented to explain what love between dissimilar-background and -culture people would cost them...and how that cost was exacted on the partner who did the moving.

I'm glad someone thought to make this over into a queer retelling. It applies more thoroughly to queer couples than even straight ones. Colin regaling Lir with the awfulness of humans to same-sex couples wasn't exaggerating too much.

Why Colin needed rescuing in the middle of a storm at sea isn't interrogated at all until practically halfway through the text. It's a funny choice to wait so long. Once Lir saves Colin in defiance of all the rules set by his people, he appears not to suffer much in the way of consequences. Well, the sea is *immense* so it would be tough to effectively track him...but there are eyes everywhere and a merman meeting on the regular with a landman wouldn't strike any observer as ordinary.

The desire to, shall we say, be with one's love object is a powerful imperative indeed. In the source tale, the Sea Witch offers the little mermaid the same choice as Lir receives from her in this version: a potion that lasts three days, but costs you your voice. A more perfect metaphor for cross-cultural love matches I've never heard of or read: you lose your native language, your familiar cultural references, and your automatic responses make no sense whatever in the new world. It's like being queer in straight spaces. You'll never ever be one of them; they'll know it, you'll know it, so no one's ever really at ease.

These real-world subtexts are largely absent from Author Witt's retelling. It bears down hard on the sweet, loving, needy side of the story. Lir and Colin are required to make changes with life-defining consequences, seemingly very much without angst. I'm not going to criticize that heavily because this is a fantasy novel. If it were set in a realistic world, I'd have some scathing comments to make on that storytelling lacuna.

On the count of holiday escapism informed with enheartening vibes of love conquering all, this novel gets my hearty endorsement. On the count of repurposing an old heteronormative tale to be queer, it gets croons and warbles of delight. It's Yuletide...ditch reality for a world where men come out of the deep ocean to find you for true love.