Tag: Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Book review: The Siren, the Song and the Spy by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Fantasy novel, The Siren, the Song and the Spy by Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the sequel to The Mermaid the Witch and the Sea. In The Siren, the Song and the Spy there are more characters, the stakes are higher, and the story bigger than the first book.

The Sea is forever destined to forget. And I am forever destined to remember.

The Sea worries about the continued hunting of mermaids for their blood, Alfie has been helping pirates stage a rebellion against the Empire, and the Empire has been quelling rebellions as fast as it can.

I don’t believe we can beat them. Not because we are not fierce enough, but because in order to win, we’d have to abandon everything that we are.

Meanwhile Genevieve washes up on the Red Shore of Wariuta. Koa who finds her decides to spare her life even though she had a crack at his and his sister, Kaia. Kaia doesn’t trust her. As Genevieve begins to discover things are not all as she believed in the Empire, she has to decide where her loyalties lie.

Let’s go make something of this world.

The Siren, the Song and the Spy is an action packed, emotionally complex and rich story told from multiple points of view. There is deep diversity in the characters, and the world building is impressive and large scale. Themes include colonialism, oppression, imperialism, resistance,racism, ableism, 

Book review: The Mermaid the Witch and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

On By rlsmithwritingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I read The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall with my book group and loved it. Queer + Pirates, what more could you want? 

There’s freedom in stories, you know. We read them and we become something else. We imagine different lives, and while we turn the pages, we get to live them. To escape the lot we’re given.

The story is a young adult swashbuckling, fantastical, sapphic, girls own adventure. There are pirates, mermaids, greed driven, despotic overlords, hero’s and villains. Not that different to the real world really…colonialism, imperialism, misogyny. 

Corsets are stupid

Flora and her brother became pirate crew in order to have a place to live and food in their bellies. Gender fluid and black, Flora disguises herself as a man called Florian (think Pope Joan?) and falls in love with one of the passengers – Lady Evelyn Hasegawa. 

If Florian was the wall that guarded Flora, then Evelyn had scaled his heights.

Evelyn is on board supposedly to be wed in an arranged marriage at their destination. In actual fact her parents had sold her to the highest bidder due to her difference (code for lesbian). There’s a catch as the wealthy passengers are about to be told they are to be sold as slaves. So of course Florian has to rescue Evelyn. 

After that, she wondered, how improper was it — really — to slap a man in the face for staring?

The pair make a daring escape, rescuing a mermaid in the process, who then along with the sea (a character with thoughts and feelings) rescues them – spitting them out on an island shore where a witch revives them.

There’s nothing out there to punish evil, no one out there to reward the righteous. We’re all just adrift.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea is brimming with diversity, adventure, romance and a good lashing of the kind of violence, blood and guts colonialism is famous for. A fun read and other worldly adventure.