In this hauntingly romantic, queer fantasy from Shannon K. English, a young mermaid is forced to choose between her old life above the waves and her new life below them.

On land, Eppie will never be anything more than the outcast girl who kissed the grocer's daughter. But beneath the water's surface lies a future and a society she could never have imagined. Stolen from the shore, she is transformed. Eppie is stronger, swifter-and hungrier. Human flesh smells like heaven on earth, and Eppie is ravenous.

She has become a monster of the deep-a mermaid.

Despite the horror of her new appetites, Eppie learns to love this strange second life. The mermaid colony is mesmerizing and Eppie's new sisters are fiercely loyal. And when Eppie meets Marie, a stunningly beautiful mermaid with a past as shadowed as her raven-black scales, she finds she no longer needs to resist the desires that were denied to her on land.

But dark sails are on the horizon. The mermaid hunters are coming, armed with cannons and Biblical wrath. Eppie must decide whether to protect the new, monstrous family she's found or leave it all behind for a chance to live above the waves once again.