This book felt like being a kid and holding a conch to your ear, listening (or in this case reading) something so beautiful, so profound that the memory sticks for life.

When the Tides Held the Moon isn’t just a good story with an incredible plot, it’s deeply emotional and punches you in the chest. Set in 1910s Coney Island, it follows Benny, a Boricua blacksmith who finds himself in the strange, striking world of Luna Park, where he meets Río, a real, captive merman.

Their bond is soft and memorable, more than just love, it’s about freedom, belonging, and truly being seen by those around you. Río completely stole my heart, with his gentle spirit.

The writing is dreamy and lush, and the illustrations added so much to the story. The mix of history and fantasy was executed flawlessly, this book is quiet, gentle type of magic.

I was genuinely not prepared for how deeply this book would affect me.
“When the Tides Held the Moon” by Venessa Vida Kelley completely caught me off guard, it’s one of those stories that lingers, quietly, long after you’ve finished the last page.

I want to start by thanking Hambright PR and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. I’m so grateful I got to experience this book early, because it was such a personal journey for me.

This is not your typical fantasy. It’s not loud, or full of action and drama every five seconds. It’s soft ✨, introspective 🌀, and achingly beautiful 💔. It blends historical fiction with magical realism in the most natural way. The 1910s New York setting felt immersive and gritty, you can almost smell the sea salt 🌊, feel the hum of Coney Island 🎡, and sense the weight people carry behind their performances.

And the characters? Let me breathe for a second 😮‍💨.

Benny… my heart. He’s such a quiet character, but there’s so much emotion under the surface. A Puerto Rican blacksmith just trying to find a place to belong in a world that constantly tells him he doesn’t. He’s grieving, isolated, and emotionally stuck, but he’s also tender and observant 🫶. I connected to him immediately, I saw parts of myself in his uncertainty, his loyalty, and the way he carries love like a secret.

Then there’s Río 🐚. A merman, yes, but not like you’d expect. He’s otherworldly, mysterious, and fierce, but also soft in the most heartbreaking ways. He’s trapped, physically, emotionally, metaphorically, and watching him shift between rage and tenderness had me constantly on edge.

Their connection? I don’t even know how to explain it. It wasn’t insta-love. It was earned. Built on quiet moments, stolen glances 👀, subtle gestures. I was holding my breath half the time because I felt the tension, the longing, the ache of not being able to say what you feel.

And the sideshow crew?? I adored the whole found family vibe 🫂. They’re all outcasts in their own way, but they protect and support one another like it’s second nature. It made me emotional seeing the quiet love between them in such a harsh world.

There were so many scenes that made me pause and just feel. I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by a story with a mythical creature and a century-old setting. But somehow, this book made everything feel relevant. Identity, grief, freedom, queer love, silent resilience… all of it.

I was shocked 😳 at how tender it all was.
Surprised by how sad it made me in the most comforting way.
And I didn’t expect it to make me reflect on how we connect with others, especially when words fall short.

Also, the writing??? Absolutely stunning ✍️. Kelley’s prose is lyrical without being heavy. Poetic, but never distant. I could see everything, the rust on the boardwalk, the gleam of scales in the dark, the moonlight shimmering across the ocean 🌕.

It’s a quiet book, but so powerful. One of those stories where the silences say just as much as the dialogue.

Final thoughts: this is a love story, yes, but also a story of liberation, healing, and belonging. I didn’t expect this book to feel so alive.

If you love:
• slow-burn queer romance 💘
• magical realism in historical settings 🗝️
• soft but strong characters 🧠❤️
• found family & quiet defiance 🧷
• lyrical and emotional storytelling
…then please pick up “When the Tides Held the Moon.”

This wasn’t just a book, it felt like a tide I didn’t want to escape 🌊.
Thank you again to Hambright PR and NetGalley for this magical ARC!
I’ll be thinking about Benny and Río for a long, long time.
currently drowning in feelings 🫠
send help (or more books like this) 📚💙

Venessa Vida Kelley's When the Tides Held the Moon is a captivating historical fantasy set in early 20th-century New York City. The narrative follows Benigno "Benny" Caldera, a Puerto Rican blacksmith who, upon crafting a tank for Coney Island's Luna Park, becomes entwined with its vibrant community of sideshow performers. There, he meets Río, a merman held captive for public display, sparking a profound and forbidden connection. Kelley's prose is lush and evocative, immersing readers in a world where love transcends boundaries, and the pursuit of freedom is paramount. The novel has been lauded for its rich storytelling and has drawn comparisons to Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water for its unique romance and historical fantasy elements.

This book is going to be known as a masterpiece.
We follow Benny, an out of place asthmatic in a 1920s Coney Island as he falls into a job at a sideshow for misfits. He unexpectedly finds himself capturing, looking after, and falling in love with a Merman, known as Rio.
This book is a beautifully written story about found family, discrimination and love. The pacing is perfect, slower in some parts but justifiably so. I read this in two days, and once Benny and Rio’s relationship started to bloom I was hooked.
The illustrations throughout the book were astounding and I also really enjoyed the use of Spanish throughout. I am not Spanish but I felt this enhanced rather than diminished my enjoyment of this book.
Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to read this.

When the tides held the moon by Vanessa Vida Kelly

"Abhi na jaao chhod kar
ke dil abhi bhara nahi
Tr:
Please don’t leave yet,
my heart isn’t satiated yet"

Oh how I crave that soft love the two of them share!

The best of 2025 for me. Seriously . Every other book I've read/I'm gonna read this year can go home now because the winner has already been chosen. And I LOVE authors who are also artists because they can show us EXACTLY what they thought up in their brains. The illustrations are to die for 😩💯.

It's a historical fantasy set in America , featuring a merman captured by a human freakshow runner (think- the greatest showman but less friendly)longing for freedom, and an immigrant blacksmith's woes, choosing between his found family and doing what's morally right.

But how does a love story between a disgruntled merman and an apologetic human man turn out , anyway? Vanessa knows how 😌❤️

Loved all the members of the menagerie, most of the characters I think were inspired by real people from the past.

I LOVED the greatest showman (still do)(musical nerd) so I am the exact target audience for this book.

I'll post the review on Fable/Goodreads/Insta in June I promise 🙈❤️

Wow.

This book is absolutely beautiful. I couldn't put it down but I didn't want it to end. Everything had me hooked and my only complaint was that my eARC didn't show all the illustrations because the ones I did see were magical.

Everything about this story was stunning. The characters, the setting, the language and the romance. So much longing for so many things bound up in 400+ pages.

Yes, this is at it's core a live story (and boy is that love story beautiful) but it covers so much more than that. Every single one of the characters just wants a better life but haven't quite figured out what that looks like or how to get it, making the story bittersweet.

There were so many quotes and moments that made me feel such intense emotions, I know I'll have to re-read this book again to fully untangle them all.

I will never stop recommending this book.

I remember when this was a very lovely fanfiction, way back when. I feel a bit like a proud aunt watching this story develop into a fully-fledged novel, to be honest, and I hope it is the start of a long, prolific career for Kelley as an author!

Benigno "Benny" Caldera manages to stumble upon one of the oddest jobs possible for a Puerto Rican orphan in 1910s New York City: after building a giant tank for a Coney Island show, he's invited to join the crew of sideshow performers who commissioned him. His first gig? Helping to capture the inhabitant of his creation - a merman stolen out of the East River. Over a series of lonely late nights, Benny comes to know the inhabitant, Rio, as a kindred spirit and soulmate. But those same nights reveal a terrible truth... That Rio cannot stay caged up if he is to survive. Yet, if Benny frees Rio as he knows he has to, he not only loses his love, but he inevitably bankrupts the same sideshow that has taken him in as one of their own.

This story has grown up so much from the fanfiction I remember it to be! Kelley has done such a wonderful job of combining the nostalgic 1910s NYC setting with the harsh realities of being different in a world unwilling to accept you for you. I adored the slowly unfolding mystery of Benny's past that leads us to a beautifully heart-wrenching ending, and how this ties in with Rio's existence and the quest to free him. Their slowburn romance, from kind-of-enemies to lovers and soulmates, is so well written and just all the more magical for the sideshow setting it exists in. The secondary characters all have their own charms, with Matthias the strong man being my personal favorite! But Sonia, who could so easily have been written as a disappointing secondary villain between her early rejection by Benny and her work with the proprietor of the show, also proves to be a nuanced, multi-faceted character.
AND THE ARTWORK. Anyone familiar with Kelley already knows that they are an amazingly talented artist who has gained incredible popularity in a number of book fandoms, but there is something so magical about seeing her original artwork spread throughout the book. Each piece added so much depth to the scenes.

While this was Kelley's first foray into traditional publishing, I have no doubt it won't be their last. I look forward to seeing what she creates next!

3.25/5

I don’t know …. something about this read was a bit off for me. The romance was beautiful and intense (which i didn’t really mind) but i felt like the concept was so interesting and i was super excited to read this, but in the end it fell short and the ending had me underwhelmed. Would’ve liked to learn more about both the mer land and the side characters at the Menagerie.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.)

Oh--this book captured me.

There is so much beauty in it. Beauty in the poetry and lyricism of the words themselves, sure, but also beauty in the messages and crafting and patterns throughout the story; like rhyme and meter in scenes and themes, rather than in syllables and sounds, and how fitting for a story of a siren to be told like a song.

The secrets are dropped like precious pearls, each one drifting lazily through the currents until they nestle in the sands in the depths of the heart. Perfectly timed and elegantly delivered--foreshadowed enough to be guessed at in some cases, and in others, unexpected and all the more beautiful for it. Nothing in the book feels unearned or forced, like the push and pull of a gentle tide, tugging the reader further and further out to sea, drifting safe in the arms of the Currents.

I both long for more of this world and these characters, to know more of the detail of the Currents and the society of mers, and also am so blissfully content with the amount that is shown. The cast is rich and diverse and authentic, every single character shining in their own voice on the page whether their accent is represented in their words or not. The found family feels real, as does the way they find themselves, and comparisons of the book to The Greatest Showman are not unearned. There is a beating, beautiful heart to this story and it bleeds from every pore with what it means to love, to know oneself, to be free.

This book takes my highest honour which is--I wish I could read it again for the first time.

This was really a 3.5, but I rounded up because I liked enough of the pieces of this novel that it felt appropriate.

First for the positives! I adored Benny's relationship with the sideshow members. I was a little overwhelmed by them being introduced all at once, but Kelley does a good job of making sure that we get to know all of them by the end of the novel. They felt like a group of real people, and you could understand why Benny came to love them so much and struggled with freeing Río (which would have made that plot beat insufferable otherwise). I liked that they all got to have little conversations with Benny about their own lives and identities. Vera is easily my favorite of the group (wow, the nonbinary guy likes the nonbinary person, shocking), but I was always happy to see any character from this group when they showed up.

I liked that Sonia was not villainized by the narrative, because the bar is in hell (Andrew Lloyd Webber, I'll fist fight you for what you did to Meg Giry, in addition to your many other crimes). I could VERY easily see a mlm romance novel having a woman going after one of the men in the couple and then turning her into cheap villain, but Kelley does not do this! Thank god! Sonia is always treated as multifaceted human, capable of good and evil! Her sexual abuse also does not define her! Huge win for mlm romance enjoyers who also don't hate women!

Some other miscellaneous positive points:
The artwork was a lovely addition; just because I'm an adult and getting my masters in early modern literature doesn't mean I don't love a good picture.
The prose was good on a sentence-to-sentence level, and generally good on a larger scale (except for a few points that I'll bring up later).
The setting was great; I'm always down for non-regency historical mlm romance.

Unfortunately, what didn't really do it for me was the romance between Benny and Río, to the point where it made the ending feel even more bittersweet than I think was intended. This was less due to the romance being actively bad, and more because I've just seen this sort of thing a lot now. I would have liked it a lot more a few years ago, but at my advanced age of [REDACTED], I was just inoffensively bored. Part of this may be that their romance (particularly their dialogue) felt very overwrought in a sort of YA/romantasy way. And, not to be crude, but I was rather disappointed that there was no on-page monsterfucking. I get that that was not the point of the scene, but it was also the gay mermaid/human book. Ah well, there's always original fiction posted on ao3.

On a more technical level, I found the time jumps to be a little confusing. I would assume that several weeks had gone by, when actually it was just a week or even a few days. I might have just been unobservant, but I think it could have been handled more clearly. I also found the characters' movements in climax difficult to follow, but I was reading late at night and not particularly bothered with understanding the exact choreography. None of this was dealbreakingly bad, but it did jar me out of the story every so often.

All in all, a solid contribution to the historical fantasy mlm romance catalogue, and I am eager to see more of Kelley's work. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

I loved the 1910 New York aesthetic, and the illustrations in the chapters were BEAUTIFUL.
The found family aspects I enjoyed, even though I didn't particularly enjoy the side characters as much. The romance between Benny and Rio was sweet. It's pretty straightforward as far as the plot goes. Something about the pacing felt off to me, I don't mind a slow paced story but this felt inconsistent. The ending I surprisingly enjoyed even if it was pretty vague and ambiguous. Despite not falling in love with the book, I did enjoy it. I can see others really enjoying it as well.

🌊 “You make me feel like I’m kissing the tides.” 💖 “You make me feel like I am holding the moon.” 🌖

I received an eARC of When the Tides Held the Moon from Erewhon Books in exchange for an honest review. Here are my thoughts!


🧜‍♂️ Benigno “Benny” Caldera promised the woman who raised him he would try and make a life for himself in New York, but for a young, poor, and queer Boricua man that’s easier said than done. Still, Benny does his best - and when his artistry as a blacksmith gets attention, he has the chance to craft a glorious and enormous tank for a sideshow of Coney Island.

After completing his work, Benny is asked to join the crew and is let in on their secret - this tank will be holding a real merman. But Rio, the merman in question, is not the mindless creature the crew expected. As he and Rio grow closer, Benny knows keeping him caged is wrong - but freeing him would mean losing his new home, family, and the (mer)man he loves. Will Benny be able to find the courage to let Rio reunite with the currents? And if so, what will he do next? Find out yourself on April 22nd by picking up your own copy of When the Tides Held the Moon! 🧜‍♂️

Y’all, I love a good merfolk story. And When the Tides Held the Moon was a great one. As someone who follows Venessa, I’ve been seeing artwork of Benny and Rio for years now and it was beautiful seeing them both fleshed out with a full story. The beautiful artwork was paired with a great story with themes of found family and self-acceptance taking center stage.

I really, really loved the supporting cast in this story. Part of this is probably because I’m a SUCKER for the found family trope, but also these characters felt so real. The members of the sideshow crew were allowed to be brilliant and varied and flawed and just human. It was amazing.

The romance between Benny and Rio was also so well done, the passion being balanced so well with the tense reality of their situations.

Honestly, I loved this one. There ain’t much more to say aside from that.

This book was so stunningly beautiful. The prose was gorgeous, the illustrations were incredible (more fiction should have drawings; adults deserve picture books too), and the found family trope used here brought me to tears several times. All of the characters were wonderful, and, I think, handled with care.
Benigno was a particularly well written main character - at some points he was hard to root for, but you could always understand him. It made me a bit sick to my stomach that he waited so long to try to set Río free, but you could feel his guilt, anxiety, and love practically jump off the page. The romance did end up winning me over, but I think it could have been done much better. It was sweet, romantic, and eventually believable, but the captor x captive trope is a hard one to do well, and since Benigno willingly held Río captive for much longer than he should have, the sweetness of the romance took a hit. It speaks to the author’s abilities that I still ended up liking them together despite the circumstances.
One other complaint I have is that we definitely didn’t get enough from Río. He was such an interesting character, but we were never in his head for long enough to understand him.
Despite those things, this book was a lyrical, emotional read, that touches on a number of social issues and handles them with care. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes sweet MM romances, low stakes fantasy, the circus, or just loves beautiful prose.

When the Tides Held the Moon is a great example of filing the serial numbers off a fanfic and getting it so close to great. But not quite.

It's disappointing for a book you've been looking forward to for months trip over its own plot ambitions and subpar editing. I went into the book knowing almost nothing about it--just vibes, vague ideas, and an affection for the author's art and verbal storytelling on social media--so it's not as if expectations were let down.

The art incorporated throughout is utterly charming. The first quarter of this book is absolutely incredible. Structurally brilliant with excellent character work. I was singing its praises. And then the capitalists attacked.

Had I realized a kidnapped and enslaved merman would fall in love with his captor's accomplice I never would have requested the arc. That truly is on me, my mistake. The characters and plot support this wonderful allegory about ceasing to belittle yourself for scraps from your oppressors. It's found family. It's queer belonging. It's anti-capitalist. It's pro-union. It's dissecting the American Dream and finding magic in differences. It's everything I typically want...but then Benny and Río.

Psychological pressures and "but I swear he's a good guy" aside, I can't with this romance. And this is fundamentally why we have to stop filing the serial numbers off fanfic. The reason fanfic works is it taps into the audience's canon knowledge and affection for the characters. We *know* this couple should be together.

But I don't know that about Benny and Río. In fact, I'm quite offput by the whole idea.

I don't like collaborators.

This romance dragged the entire book down for me. The surrounding plot didn't make sense without the romance's support. 60% of the book felt like a slog, the boring and necessary middle bits to connect the wonderful beginning and the predictable ending, and there were enough inconsistencies to muddle things further (e.g. holding one's breath while talking underwater). And no amount of brilliant word choice or delightful drawings can make up for that.

This is one of the best things I've read in my life. Venessa Vida Kelley is so incredibly talented. I'm in awe of how beautifully they both wrote and illustrated this story of love, belonging, and found family. And the early 20th century Coney Island setting was everything I never knew I needed. Look up photos of the parks mentioned; they are spectacular in the historical sense of the word, and make me remember what I loved about studying this time period back in grad school. I'll be thinking about this book and it's amazing characters for a long long time.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

When the Tides Held the Moon by Venessa Vida Kelley is a first person dual-POV historical fantasy romance set in 1910s New York. Benny has been struggling to fit in since moving from Puerto Rico to New York after being orphaned. A job brings him into contact with a side-show and the quest for their newest star: a merman. If Río and Benny want to be together, they’ll have to find a way to get Río out.

There are a lot of references to the realities of life in New York in the 1910s and the side-show business. A decent amount of racism and homophobia, specifically, are on display as people do bring up Benny’s race often and mistreat him for that and Benny himself has some internalized homophobia despite knowing when he was a tween that he is attracted to men pretty exclusively. There is also a mention of Filipinos being treated as a side-show exhibit just for being Filipino. I always appreciate it when a historical isn’t afraid to go there and show the truth of how people lived and common attitudes of the time, because we need to acknowledge how far we’ve come and what we can still do better. Historicals are the perfect genre to do that.

Río and Benny build a strong emotional bond over the course of several months before they finally start a romantic relationship. Río doesn’t hold resentment towards Benny for his cage but there is some initial hostility due to the death of Río’s mother the same night Río was brought in. Benny has a lot more self-loathing for how Río is living and the vat he built himself than Río ever had for the part Benny played.

The art is so stunning and really enhances the text. There’s a ride at a carnival that we get a drawing of that really helps show how unsafe amusement park rides used to be. There’s also very art of Benny and Río together as well as Río’s mother. Along with the cover and time period, the art makes the story feel more like classic lighter fantasy with more modern sensibilities.

Content warning for mentions of sexual assault

I would recommend this to fans of mermaid romances and readers of Romantasy looking for an MM romance

Lyrical and vividly written When the Tides Held the Moon is an absolutely stunning debut. I was drawn in from the first page and entranced until the last by this cast of colorful misfits, the sweet romance and of course a merman. It's impossible not to root for Benigno when he is perhaps one of the sweetest characters in existence. I only wanted good things for him the entire time (especially if those good things involved a certain merman called Rio). This book was honestly just so beautiful inside and out with lovely prose and the most gorgeous illustrations.
I do wish that we had gotten more backstory for Rio and maybe even more time spent in his pov. I would just have loved to get to know him even more deeply as a character, but regardless this book was incredible and these characters are going to live rent free in my head for a while.

I love everything this book was trying to address (found family, queer love, self reflection and acceptance etc). I’m also a big fairytale retelling fan, so the description and the accompanying illustrations really drew me in. Somewhere along the way though things didn’t completely come together for me, I felt at times there was too much language/writing.
3.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Publishing for the opportunity to read this arc!

One thing about me - I'm OBSESSED with mermaid lore. In fact, anytime my toes would touch a body of water when I was younger, I'd make a whole production of turning into a merman...can you say GAY?! So I was super buzzed about the idea of a love story set in the early 1900's between a sexy Puerto Rican blacksmith, and a sexy merman that he unwillingly captures for a Coney Island sideshow. SIGN ME UP. Venessa Vida Kelley's WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON, is THE SHAPE OF WATER, but gayer. Sometimes you just need to be held by a merman and kiss the living day lights out of him. Ya know?

This is a story about finding found family amongst outcasts, learning how to breathe, and accepting yourself fully while breaking free of the cages that are imposed on you. I thought this was a whimsical and stylish period piece flowing with beautiful prose, and a love story that made me swoon and wish for a merman of my own. These two cuties are giving each other seashells, and I can't even find a decent date in LA! What gives?! Would I have loved to see some mer-spice? Absolutely. Did it need it? No, the love story was sweet enough without it.

Special thanks to Kensington Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An ode to anyone who feels “other,” When the Tides Held the Moon follows two main characters: Benigno, a queer Puerto Rican man who found his way to New York at the behest of his dying aunt, and (for lack of the native tongue I’ll call him) Rio, a merman who has been tricked and captured by a circus sideshow. What starts as a story about the struggle to survive in a world that hardly sees you as human, winds up as a burgeoning love story to both self and others, and a testament to family, be it chosen or Harmonious.

Sometimes you are so drawn in by the stunning (unique, insane, beyond gorgeous, want-to-buy-the-artwork-for-my-wall) illustrations covering a new book, only to be left with an impression of the actual text that is lower than the expectation that beautiful cover set forth for you. Luckily for me, this is not one of those times.

Venessa Vida Kelley spins a tale so thorough, I felt like I was one of the “exhibits” myself. The world-building is so well-explored that I could envision everything going on around us, from the menagerie to the Albemarle. The writing is equally stunning - we get so little of Rio’s POV, but the bits we are fed work so well to enable the audience to create a magical existence from the negative space. Rio’s voice and Benny’s are so unique from one another, never leaving space for doubt that these are two very separate personas.

The found family is this book is second to none. It is a love letter to diversity, intentional in its method of creating a space for people from so many different walks of life. I know the obvious cast comparison would be to The Greatest Showman, but the host of personalities depicted within these characters more reminded me of the ensemble from Atlantis: The Lost Empire (yes, the children’s movie) - with Paul F. Tompkins thrown in as Mr. Morgan.

We touch on plenty of subjects that are all too relevant today (racism, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, worker’s rights, identity of all kinds - gender, sexual, cultural, etc.) and none are shown less grace than they deserve. The expertise with which Kelley navigates these topics, along with the stellar writing, had me sure that she’d been publishing for years. Imagine my surprise when I found out (halfway through the book) that not only is this her debut novel, but she also illustrated it herself?! Venessa you’re making the rest of us look bad!

I loved that the author brought pieces of her own rich culture and its history to the story. I especially love the Spanish inclusion within the text - and I would remind other readers that not everything needs to be as convenient as possible to an English-only-speaking audience (myself included in that population), and that having to pause to look up a word might serve as insight into a journey that millions of people need to take each day in America. Personally, I’m grateful to Kelley for teaching me how to curse so colorfully in a second language. It also (not joking here) convinced me to sign up for Spanish lessons on Duolingo, and at this moment in time I know how to say “I eat apples” (“yo como manzanas”), so I’d say this book has already changed me for the better.

When the Tides Held the Moon casts a spotlight on the many different ways that one can feel like their body doesn’t properly belong to them, and pushes us to wonder whether truly loving someone means holding on as tightly as you can, or releasing your grip and letting go. At its core, it is a journey of leaving your shame behind, and embracing who you always were. I will be forcing everyone I know to read this book. 5 salt-water-soaked stars.

Movies and television shows to watch after you read this book: The Shape of Water, Big Fish, The Little Mermaid, Water for Elephants, Aquamarine, The Greatest Showman, Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Thank you to NetGalley, Kensington Publishing, and Erewhon Books for sharing an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.