The Mermaid’s Madness by Jim C. Hines

ISBN: 9780756405830

I bought this book.

The Mermaid’s Madness follows The Stepsister Scheme in Hines’ Princess series. It focuses on Talia (Sleeping Beauty), Danielle (Cinderella) and Snow (Snow White) whose stories are far darker than Disney would have you believe. In The Mermaid’s Madness Hines takes on possibly the least-happy fairy tale, Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid.

Fairy tale fans know that this tale is sad and gruesome while Hines fans will find this to be the prefect tale for Hines’s princesses as Hines uses a heavy subtext of emotional recovery in this series.

Lirea is the Little Mermaid, once friend to Queen Beatrice (Danielle’s mother-in-law) who fell in love with a human prince who didn’t love her and was given a knife that would restore her tail at the cost of her betrayer prince’s life. But something happened and now Lirea is mad, broken and violent. When greeted by the queen after her family of undine return from their winter hibernation Lirea lashes out, stabbing the queen and trapping her soul in the cursed knife along with the prince’s. Now Talia, Danielle and Snow must find the cause of Lirea’s madness, find Lirea herself, and free the queen before her body gives out.

Hines’ work is excellent, layered between the fantasy and fancy of fairy tales with a real world punch that adult readers can’t help but expect. Sure we all want there to be a happy ending, but isn’t it more satisfying when it’s fought for, earned, not merely handed over as if the players are exceptions to human nature instead of parts of it? The Mermaid’s Madness is an excellent retelling of the original that nails the morbid sweetness of the legend while making it a more vibrant, fleshy thing before reader’s eyes. Fantasy and urban fantasy fans are missing out if they aren’t reading this series.