TL;DR: Everything except the characters was nice here.
Source: NetGalley, thank you so much!
Plot: Bad things happen to one woman and she looses all intelligence for the plot to move as intended.
Characters: I did really like them till they all started acting like fools.
Setting: The sea and various shorelines were primary but while it added in a way I wish we’d gotten more.
Fantasy/Romance: While I’ll give it props for an interesting Fantasy setup, the Romance believability was shot in the foot by this main character.
Summary:
Queen Coralys rules the Kingdom of the Five Isles, but when disaster strikes, killing her husband and destroying half her nation, she pleads with the gods for salvation. And they do save her, turning back the terrible winds and tide and snatching her islands from the brink of destruction.
But the gods have a wicked sense of justice and they demand an exchange for their help: Coralys must marry the first man to set foot on her pier. Coralys expects the fleet of a neighboring country to come to rescue her people, led by its prince, a loyal ally. What she gets instead is a fisherman so sunburnt and stinking that her court can barely keep their breakfast down.
Coralys marries the fisherman just as she promised the gods, and sets out with him in his unkempt dinghy, with nothing but hopes of revenge against the gods to keep her from despair. But what she does not know is that the fisherman is actually the god of the sea. And he stepped on her dock for a reason.
His own kingdom besieged, his body terribly wounded, and his place as a god threatened, the fisherman has plans to turn the tides set against him and finally offer a place of refuge for his people. But working the magic he needs will require the help of the one woman bent on his destruction.
Thoughts:
I was eating this up in the first 20-30%. Absolutely beautiful world and ideas here. The language was lovely and the setup was intriguing. I was very excited for the idea that a queen in grief might fight solace in this stranger and fall in love! And she’s a seasoned queen, surely she’s intelligent and not driven by her blind emotions. Right?
Wrong. This book takes away all agency from the characters, making them dumb as the coral that Coralys is named for simply to make the plot move. A queen, one who by all accounts was successful in her rule, and you expect me to believe she just believes the ghost of what she herself calls a ‘BAD’ person. She just jumps to the conclusions she draws based on the barest hint of information? And don’t worry, it’s not just her. Oke also makes some dumb decisions. But it was Cora that really truly got under my skin.
This kind of poor decision making for the sake of the plot is one of my biggest pet peeves. We can’t think of a creative way to do things, we have to just hamfist our way to what the author wants. I wasn’t a fan. There was the start of something beautiful here, but past that start we fall flat on our face. Ugh.
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