This is an OK book. Not superb but interesting, solid, and utterly professional.It revolves around a fisherman’s daughter, Mari Prothero, who lives with her father in a small village in Wales sometime during the reign of Queen Victoria. On her 18th birthday, Mari learns that she must marry one of the sea folks, Selch, half-human half-seal, because of the binding bargain, made generations ago by Mari’s great-great-great… you get the drift.
Out of this bargain, the Prothero family gets their incredible fishermen’s luck, and the Selch solve their low-rate reproduction crisis. There is a catch, of course: the marriage is going to be temporary, and out of the two babies of that marriage, Mari will have to give up one to the Selch people. For centuries, the bargain worked to the satisfaction of all, until Mari came to the scene. Stubborn and gifted with water magic, she turned the whole ‘arranged marriage’ situation upside down.
There are a number of problems in this novel. The protagonist’s obstacles are rather small and artificial, and the villain(s) are smaller still. Besides, for half the book, I couldn’t decide who the protagonist was, who to root for. And even when I decided, I liked the cast of secondary characters better. Many of them are transplants from another novel of the series, The Wizard of London, including the duo of resourceful young women, Sarah and Nan, all grown up now, plus their charming avian familiars, the raven and the parrot, and of course, the Puck.
Unfortunately, the rehashing of Nan’s and Sarah’s adventures in the previous novel occupies pages of italic text and slows up the action considerably. Adding to the reader’s irritation is the enormous amount of details, both magical and mundane. Most of them are unnecessary for the plot; they make the storyline diluted, lost in the verbiage.
Despite all of the above, the novel reads easily and fast, and I enjoyed it. Not once was I tempted to abandon the book, although I have to admit I flipped through some pages to get to the pertinent parts of the tale.
Overall a good read, especially for Lackey’s fans.
