She Who Was Once the Sea
Dana Shea
Publisher: Self-published
Publication date: Sept. 29, 2026
Genre: Fantasy Romance
Once, Marella belonged to the sea.
She and her family were emissaries, not monsters, swimming the borders between sea and land, keeping peace between the merfolk and the human city of Rossaia. But when the humans turned on them, the mermaids sought salvation from The Stone Witch.
She kept her word, but she also damned them.
Now, Marella and her family exist trapped in stone at the heart of a dried-up city, freed only on the night of the new moon.
And with that freedom comes thirst. To survive, they must drink human blood before dawn seals them back into statues.
Garrett is living an unmoored life.
Looking for something to anchor him, he arrives in Rossaia haunted by emptiness. There, he joins the Fratelli di Sangue, an ancient brotherhood sworn to cleanse the city of the monsters haunting its streets.
Monsters like Marella.
When a chance encounter turns into a dangerous rescue on a moonless night, both hunter and hunted find their certainties unraveling. Drawn together by blood, secrets, and a forbidden pull neither can deny, they stand on opposite sides of a war older than memory, and to choose each other may mean betraying everything they believe in.
My thoughts…
Mermaid stories are not something I see all that often. So, when I heard about this book, I was excited to read it. I mean, mermaids that are cursed to become stone all but once a month, when they are released from their stone casings in order to drink the blood of humans to survive until the next new moon. Basically, cursed vampiric mermaids?! I was hooked.
The book starts out strong with the backstory of the merfolk and how they wound up cursed. Even though, for centuries, they had been encased in stone, nothing more than statues to everyone in the world, they are still alive inside. They can still see and feel everything that goes on around them. So, they are unfortunately fully aware of the time that passes. This part was really heart-wrenching to think about. It would be one thing if they just slept between the new moons, but they are stuck in this stasis of watching life go on around them while they remain frozen and helpless. Learning about their history may have been the best part of this story.
As for the main characters, I liked Marella. Sure, she was cutthroat and didn’t seem to have remorse for killing people, but she did what she had to do. She found the predators in the area and took care of them. So, while killing is obviously a big no-no, at least she was killing with morals… right? Then you have Garrett, who is essentially in Italy to find and exterminate her kind. Not too much goes into him or his “brotherhood,” other than the fact that they will take anyone who signs up to help exterminate the monsters of the city. From the sounds of it, Garrett is just there because he needed a change of scenery and was feeling like he was adrift in life. So, his heart wasn’t really in it. Again, I didn’t really get a good sense of Garrett, even though the book was half in his POV.
I liked that the romance wasn’t all-encompassing when it came to the story. The stone witch tells her that she needs to make a man fall in love with her in a week, and I got nervous. Lust? Sure, that can be done. But actual, real love… people do not fall in love in 7 days. So, I was a bit worried when this became the answer to breaking their centuries-long curse. Thankfully, that didn’t become a thing.
One thing I did have a little bit of an issue with was missing pieces throughout the book. There’s this brotherhood, but you only ever see Garrett and his partner, Lucas. They all live together, and yet you never see them. At one point, Marella spots one of her sisters, but it’s not during the new moon. This isn’t really explained. I wanted to know how and why she’s running around, and whether or not her other family members are “awake.” What deal did she make with the stone witch, and HOW did she make a deal if she was in stone? Or did she make this deal during the last new moon and has been running around this entire time? Then there is a part in the book where a person is completely relocated from a basement location to being out on the street. No explanation. Just a “I don’t know how I got here” response.
Now, I get it. I can suspend my sense of reality and believe that there are not only mermaids, but that statues could, in fact, be vampiric creatures that were cursed to stone by an evil witch. However, what I cannot fall in line with is people popping about in random locations without any sort of explanation. Apparently, that is where I draw the line.
This was a quick and enjoyable read. I liked the spin on mermaids that the author took. I liked their writing style and the way they told the story. For a novella, it had a lot of meat to the story that I wasn’t expecting. I could have easily sat down and read another 200 pages without blinking. I think, for what the author was setting up in this book, it would have been better as a full-length novel. There were a lot of pieces being juggled and not enough time to fully execute it all.
