Mary Mecham’s Hunting Sirens is billed as a sweet romantic retelling of the Little Mermaid.
But I wasn’t sure what to expect: how do you make a romance with a Deaf, grumpy blacksmith and the creature she’s sworn to kill? While one lives on land while the other in the sea? No spoilers here but Mary Mecham managed it very cleverly.
There’s a lot of action and adventure with plenty of thrilling heroics. Mostly on the part of Treva, the Siren Hunter, a very tough young woman forced into fighting the sirens because of her immunity to their call. Her resistance to her feelings for one of the sirens and her (eventual) falling in love with him feels real, not forced by the plot.
I enjoyed this gender-switched retelling of the Little Mermaid a lot. The main characters are great and even the side characters well-fleshed out with plenty of their own agency and motivations.
Sirens. With every fiber of my being, I hated them. I hated that their existence trapped us on our island and that our people were starving. More than anything, I hated the feeling that we were powerless to stop them.
BJ Sikes, author 