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.

GOLEMCRAFTERS, fascinating middle-grade fantasy about identity and acceptance

GOLEMCRAFTERS
EMI WATANABE COHEN
Levine Querido (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5 of five

The Publisher Says: Emi Watanabe Cohen’s sophomore novel travels from the most awkward surface tensions to the beautiful depths of Jewish culture and lore for a tale of magical and emotional discovery.

On the same day Faye's brother comes home with a black eye, a package arrives from a relative they have never met. It's a slab of clay: some weird kind of bar mitzvah present?

The strange gift turns out to be an invitation to learn a craft that has been in their family for centuries. And it's not pottery.

Faye and Shiloh are driven to New York City by their grandfather for a spring break filled with magical instruction. But at night, they find themselves transported to a strange parallel world, where groups of innocent people are facing appalling hatred and violence. Are Faye and Shiloh destined to defend them?

How is that possible for a brainy, unpopular eleven-year-old and her vulnerable older brother?

It will take all the strength they can draw from their Jewish and Japanese heritage to not only crack the mystery of this alternate world but to find the power in them to confront the troubles of their present.

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

My Review: Fascinating remix of the well-known, always interesting, legend of the Golem. Imagine being Othered twice over: Japanese and Jewish so too Jewish for the Asian crowd, too not-Jewish for the Jews. The bullying, the name-calling, all terrible enough in middle school, get that much worse!

Shiloh comes home after being roughed up by bullies at school...at no time in the narrative do we see kids more than glancingly interact with their parents, which I recall tracks well with middle school behavior...to find his last bar mitzvah present waiting for him. It's from his father's father, whom he's never met, so of course he's intensely curious about it. It's decided, after it gets opened to reveal it's a big lump of clay, that the kids will go spend the summer coming up with their Zeyde, there to learn the family secret trade of golemcrafting...a trade I'd *literally*never*considered might exist, even in a fantasy world.

In this summer of learning about Zeyde, about their ethnic history, about magic and its workings, there's a fair old bit of Jewish historical trauma. Here's what I say to parents who think their children can't, or shouldn't, be exposed to traumatic historical facts: If they've ever watched the news at all, they already know the worst of what people can do to each other in god's name. Teach them, or let them learn about if you can't do it yourself, the history of how hate for the Other has warped and perverted societies. They'll know what to look out for if they've seen it before they can fall into it.

The author's unique heritage, like Shiloh and Faye's, is part of the reason she should bet trusted to tell your middle-grader about this blended identity, its struggles, and its rich rewards. Even if your child is not either of these ethnicities, this novel is a delightful fantasy work about a stern old mage teaching bumptious apprentices the whys, hows, and don'ts of magic. I've never met a middle-grader (look at the name, forevermore!) who didn't feel that awkward neither fish nor fowl unbelonging. This novel will give the reader of most all ages the strong sense of being seen in their social awkwardness.

As there is a lot of violence dealt with, discussed, but not shown directly, so as to make the middle-grade designation fit comfortably. There is also a very...pat...ending. I'm not sure I'd expect a fourteen-year-old not to complain about the kid-book vibe this presents, so be aware before gifting it up.

A solid performance from a writer gifted in making the tough parts feel manageable.

SOUR CHERRY, feminist retelling of the folktale Bluebeard...only with empathy

SOUR CHERRY
NATALIA THEODORIDOU
Tin House Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

2025 Nebula Award nominee for Best Novel. Winners will be announced June 3-7, 2026.

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

WINNER OF the 2026 Locus Award for FIRST NOVEL!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard—one of the most mythologized serial killers—twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Retelling "Bluebeard," one of the most unsettling folk tales I've ever encountered, was a shoo-in to get my admiring attention for this novelist's debut effort. At about the 45% mark, the scene under the cherry tree, I found the time jumping wearing me down...no particular effect was, in my observation, intended for these shifts. They do not seem coupled to changes in emotional register, or attached to revelations of characters' understandings of themselves or each other. Instead they felt to me like ways to avoid exploring an important shift in something because after the time shift the event shifted from is dealt with in short and sharp explanation..."after that Tristan looked at his hand a lot"...without much depth. As this story explores the fear and the disappointment that must inevitably accompany truly loving another person, that matters. The ending was, as a result of this ongoing issue, a bit anticlimactic.

The plus side is that this is a retelling of a quite brutal tale that tries hard to be in the main character's corner. Something that gives kids like me nightmares is brought into the realm of reason. It's very empathetic, it's very willing to engage the readers' empathy. This makes the awfulness all the more poignant and impactful, and is the source of all my positive feelings for the book. It grapples with the deep, oceanic sadness of loving someone who is haunted by an awful past, whose emotional tides do not stop at the shores between himself and the world. It brings a lovingkindness to the seemingly cursed eternal outsider, yet doesn't play the victim card for the monster or the lover.

Craft quibbles aside, I found this story quite engrossing or I'd've simply Pearl-Ruled it. I haven't raised the thematic elements of horror to content-warning status because, frankly, if you need CWs on ancient folktales you won't consider the read for more than a split second anyway.

A debut novel that portends a career of fascinating work. I already want to read Author Theodoridou's next book.

DEATHLESS, Catherynne Valente's Leningrad Diptych #1 7 October 2013

DEATHLESS
CATHERYNNE VALENTE (Leningrad Diptych #1)
Tor Books
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

2 JUNE 2021 KINDLE EDITION ON SALE FOR $2.99

The Publisher Says: Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories which have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the twentieth century.

Deathless, however, is no dry, historical tome: it lights up like fire as the young Marya Morevna transforms from a clever child of the revolution, to Koschei’s beautiful bride, to his eventual undoing. Along the way there are Stalinist house elves, magical quests, secrecy and bureaucracy, and games of lust and power. All told, Deathless is a collision of magical history and actual history, of revolution and mythology, of love and death, which will bring Russian myth back to life in a stunning new incarnation.

My Review: Remember how I said I didn't like books with majgickq and elves and stuff, and how very resistant I'd be so such stories?

Ha.

Magical to a fault, mystical and full of eyerollingly silly things like big black cars with chicken's feet instead of tires, and factories where soldiers are hand-loomed by the Tsar of Life's cast-off mistresses under the supervision of Baba Yaga.

And what can I say? Like every hard and fast rule, this rule went flooey in no time at all, thanks to some ecstatic carolings and appreciative lowings from some very talented reviewers. You terrible people know who you are. I don't love you for causing me to eat my words so publicly.

Russia is a strange, strange place to me. During some really vicious pogroms they tossed in the 19th century, a Polish Jewish ancestress of mine...great-grandmother...walked away from her shtetl, her family, and her identity, got to Bavaria and married an old Catholic man with no living children but who had a shop, and started again. He died, she sold up, she moved on to the USA via Paris, two kids and an American lover in tow. So thanks Russians for being murderously anti-Semitic or I wouldn't be alive today! But the culture that gave rise to the anti-Semitic stuff has always filled me with disgust and not a little horror at the christian hate and apostolic misery doled out on all the people. The myths of the peasantry seem so unforgiving and tricksy and just plain vicious. Then I contemplate the way the country was run (being polite, not well, not ever)...it makes sense...but it still always made me feel icky to read about it.

Then comes this melding of myth and materialsm, supernatural and Supreme Soviet...and I fell head first into love with the package.

Valente's use of language is exemplary. She never stints or holds back. Descriptions are abundant yet they are never obfuscatory; the idea is to create a 3-D experience in the reader's mind and by GUM (old Cold War humor, sorry) she does just exactly that. She never reaches beyond her grasp or talks down to her audience. If only a Russian word will do, there it is, and the nuances are not Spelled Out For You and neither must you resort to Google and Good Luck to find out what the hell this woman's on about.

This (revoltingly) young writer has the temerity and the confidence and the chops to pull off this melding of modernity and medievalism without breaking a (visible) sweat. That's one sweet achievement. This is a book that's as Russian as hot tea with sour cherry preserves and as American as serving it in a Starbucks cup.

And it's beautiful. And it's moving. And it's graceful and lovely and possessed of the most marvelous ability to switch from tango to waltz to jitterbug. Dance with her. This opportunity doesn't come every day.