As a result of my various committee appointments and commitments I am unable to disclose my personal thoughts on this title at this time. Please see my star rating for a general overview of how I felt about this title. Additionally, you may check my GoodReads for additional information on what thoughts I’m able to share publicly. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this and any other titles you are in charge of.

Such beautiful writing! It provided great imagery of seas and mermaid tails. I loved the grittier version of mermaids instead of your "Disney" mermaids.

A very long, satisfying tale. I love mermaid stories, and ones where mermaids transform into humans, especially when they aren't love stories. This book is a fabulous tale of life and death and magic

This was a middle-of-the-road read for me. While I liked a lot of aspects, there were some things I disliked, and overall, I just didn't feel strongly enough about the book to really warrant adding an in-depth review to the blog.

I very much enjoyed reading this book, I liked that it was different from the typical mermaid story. I really enjoyed Sanna and going on this journey with her. Overall this is a great read that both adults and children will enjoy.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely fell in love with the cover and the synopsis! It made me really excited to pick up this book, however 21% into the book, I really didn't feel invested in the story. I ended up DNF-ing the title shortly after that, because it felt like a chore to continue reading it.

This was an interesting rendering of a mermaid tale. Lush and beautifully written, Cokal is able to pull you in and keep you submerged, much like the threads of seaweed will do. While I really enjoyed the writing style, the story was lack luster at many points. It was a struggle to continue, as I really just did not care about the characters throughout. 3/5 stars.

Author #Susann Cokal has written a delightful novel of belonging, sacrifice, fear,hope, and mortality.
Sanna is a mermaid-but she is only half seavish.The night of her birth, a sea witch cast a spell that made Sanna’s people,including her laddish mother, forget how and where she was born.Now she is
Sixteen and a outsider in the seavish matriarchy,and she is determined to find her mother and learn 
who she is.She apprentices herself to the witch to learn the magic of .......
And now I will leave the rest to you the reader!🌸

Ever have the desire to be transported right in the middle of a dark and twisted fairytale? If so, I feel Mermaid Moon is the book for you! Inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, Mermaid Moon is a magical and intriguing story. Heads up, I’m not talking about your red head little mermaid that Disney made a sweet cute story - this is perfect for fans of the original dark shadowy fairytales.

I could not rave about the writing in this novel enough! Cokal is truly gifted. The words are enough to make anyone fall in love with this story alone - poetic and beautiful the words come alive off the pages and  surround you. The writing is descriptive, and the world is built beautifully. 

My one issue is I can’t see this working for everyone out there - if you need a good and heavy plot as the basis for anything you read, this probably isn’t for you. Compared to the wonderful built world around you, the plot tends to take a back seat. I urge you to still give it a try as it truly works for this story and this author.

Sanna is half seavish, making her an outsider in the flok. The merfolk are matrilineal, and her mother was landish. Sanna wants to search out her roots, so she becomes the apprentice to the sea witch. Crafting legs to walk on land, Sanna looks for her mother, instead finding a witch who has drained life and magic from a series of victims in order to live forever.

Influenced by the Hans Christian Anderson story of the Little Mermaid, this young adult novel follows the mermaid desiring to go to land to find her missing mother. The actual story takes place over the course of a week, and Sanna learns a lot about herself and the nature of love during that time. There is love of a child for a parent, and parent to child, extended family members, teacher/student caring, as well as romantic and platonic love. There are many relationships within the novel, not always explicitly discussed. Sanna has always felt love from her father, but when she discovers that her mother had been forced to leave her behind and everyone had forgotten her, she wants to find what she had been missing without her mother.

The story flows ridiculously fast, and while the Baroness is used to getting her own way and has magic of her own, it still seems unrealistic for the speed at which everything progresses. She can determine that Sanna should marry her son Peder right away, as that would be a way to control Sanna's magic, but to have everything set up for a grand wedding and a water garden created within three days stretches my incredulity. The language and descriptions are sumptuous, and I love the fact that the merfolk have such a different society than the landish folk. Other than that, I wasn't too convinced by Sanna's actual romantic choice at the conclusion of the novel.

Such a sweet and interesting book. Gorgeous writing, magical plot and well developed characters. Highly reccomend.

Sadly, I couldn’t get into this book. There just seemed to be a gap between the reader and the characters. I love the cover though. It is beautiful and lyrical.

This story was pretty good - I enjoyed a lot of it, especially given that mermaids are pretty rare (but slowly rising!) in YA these days so I'm always down to read something about them! I think I just didn't vibe well with the writing style of this, which is more on me than anyone else. But the story was interesting overall, and it's definitely a good read for someone looking for something lush about mermaids!

4 stars

Sanna is a mermaid that longs to solve the mystery of who her landish mother is. With the help of magic she is able to go ashore and look for her mother, but in the process she finds more mysteries and trouble than she intended.
This is not my first book by Susann Cokal so I was not really sure what to expect when I started this book. Everything I love about this book is so hard to describe without giving too many details that could ruin the book. Cokal has a way of making everything she writes seem so poetic, even if she is describing ugly and terrible things, you almost seem to forget the nature of the acts because the words are so lovely. I have come to expect a certain element of weirdness when it comes to her books.  
The characters were an interesting mix for me in this one, I wasn't particularly attached to any of them, and the ones I was rooting for were more background characters, but I was curious to see what would happen to them and enjoyed watching all the strong personalities at play. There was such an air of mystery surrounding each character that I had to see it all through. The side characters are what really made this book for me, there were a lot of different personalities that really shined through for me and I enjoyed them all so much. They each were given such detail that you got to see little personal things for each character that they all shine differently.
The genre of this book would be hard to describe, historical fantasy is the best I can phrase it.  Everything is written so that you believe you could find these people, this place or these events in a history book, and the magical elements aren't so high fantasy that they are unrealistic. Mermaids are a part of many different culture's lore, and magic can easily be explained as miracles, and this book is just an interesting mix of the two. I want to  this book as like a Grimm Fairytale, at first glance it is this beautiful story, but some of the finer details are dark and twisted. I can't wait for what Susann Cokal has in store for us next!

Beautifully written, but some parts were too descriptive making it long and losing connection with the characters and plot. The main character fell flat for me, but I did love the darker themes and lgbtq representation. I also love a good quest and this book had one with the "overcome" and triump trope.

This started out feeling like an elevated, whimsical, literary take on the Little Mermaid and towards the middle it gets lost in its own one-dimensional, bleak tone. The heroine of this tale falls into a trope of being the "casual observer" that I see a lot in the literary fiction world. No personality of her own - simply observing and accepting what's going on around her with barely any sense of self-preservation or purpose. 

Sanna is literally a fish out of water - a mermaid who magically grew legs in order to find her estranged mother. She is captured by a devil of a woman - a baroness who is also secretly a powerful witch who uses the bones of her family members to keep herself youthful. The baroness plans to wed her to her son in order to make an army of hybrid mermaid children that she can murder and absorb youth from.

Yeah.

Sanna realizes pretty quickly what's happening here and still barely does anything about it. For a majority of the book, she is just casually present and not much else. She doesn't fight against a marriage to a man she doesn't like. She  realizes the witch's plot against her and walks back into a prison cell instead of trying to escape just to see what would happen. She conveys nothing in terms of personality except the repeated objective of finding her mother, which isn't really a personality trait and she doesn't really do a great job at.

There is not much light against the dark in this tale. The villain is a far more fleshed out individual in terms of characterization - and she is a depressing SOB. She has a room full of her own children's bones - she plots and fantasizes about murdering children to keep herself young. As a mother, that kind of imagery, set up against a lukewarm protagonist and a bleak, tragic tale of imprisonment, is enough to convince me this was not the book for me.

Thank you to netgalley for a digital copy in exchange for an unbiased review.

I received a copy of this book for a fair and honest review. I got some Little Mermaid vibes from this. I am not sure if this is a true retelling, but it was a powerful story. Sanna has to deal with magic, struggle with her duality of sea and land, and falling in love. It is a tale that makes you want all the best things for Sanna and her journey. Her father from the sea and her mother from the land. She wants to learn about her mother and her world. I enjoyed this for there was just something about Sanna that was very relatable and powerful.

I thought the author was great at world-building and descriptions but the characters just weren't that compelling.

Many thanks to the author, the publishers, and NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

This book was sadly not for me. I have read several books about mermaids and sirens, and for the most part just the fact that they are about these specific mythical creatures helps me like them, but Mermaid Moon was simply too boring for me. In the beginning I was intrigued by the quest the main characters is embarking on, but boy was I disappointed. This book has more or less no plot, no drive, nothing that made me want to keep reading. I also struggled a bit with the writing style, I was unable to connect with any of the characters and the switches between first and third person povs made it even worse. I did enjoy some of the lore and the magic, but it was not enough for me personally.

I received a complimentary copy of this title from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed are my own. 

I pretty much request any book I see involving mermaids. Some have been good, some interesting, some terrible. This one floats somewhere between. 

The story is definitely interesting and several of the characters are compelling enough to keep you interested. The author's writing style is...wordy. At times, it's lovely to get lost in. Others, it's a bit of a bore and you just want to flip pages ahead to see if anything happens.

I probably wouldn't necessarily read it again, but I did enjoy it and am glad I gave it a chance!