PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksTold in poetic, meticulous prose interspersed with oral storytelling verse, this novel is a love story between a mermaid and a fisherman. While this may seem like a tale often told, it is set apart by the rich materiality of the writing and of its Caribbean setting. While this is a true romance, a lush dance between two compelling characters, it is also about the logics and the violence of possession: how greed, envy, and the quest to own — land, money, people — hurts nature, people, and love itself ... Aligning with the novel’s feminist critique, the love affair between David and Aycayia reverses and upends many of the familiar narratives and stock imagery of Western mermaid lore ... Roffey’s language, somehow simultaneously quiet and highly sensory, gives her mermaid depth, wildness, rawness, and texture. Aycayia feels more natural than supernatural, her body inextricable from nature. She moves with muscular power, gleams with sharp appendages, and writhes with other creatures of the sea ... Roffey takes on the themes of genocide, colonialism, and enslavement — which, in a novel concerned with ownership and possession, is rarely mentioned — with a strangely gentle touch...I am also perplexed by the novel’s representation of Black women ... A difficult task within romance, it manages to maintain conflict and tension without creating arbitrary obstacles for the couple at its center. The plot moves forward in an organic-feeling way ... In capturing every detail of the mermaid’s slow, messy transformation back to woman, Roffey speaks to longings that, as a reader, I did not know I had ... Yes, I have some questions about a few of Roffey’s choices and depictions. But reading this novel, I also find myself thinking about how I want to be loved, about how I am loving or not loving those in my life. There are those who may need patience and care through their own transformations, and those who may, also, need to be let go.