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A review by crushcritiques
Merciless Waters by Rae Knowles
3.0
“I offer you endlessness. Eternity with your love. Would you so quickly toss that away for a moment of vengeance?”
“Merciless Waters” weaves mythology into a beautiful and haunting tale of a group of women sailing aimlessly on the sea on their ship Scylla, when they rescue a man from drowning. Knowles has crafted a gorgeously written sapphic novelette with rich, eloquent prose that tells a tale of love, loss, jealousy, memory, sisterhood, and vengeance. Achingly exquisite at times, this novel starts off so strongly but unfortunately loses it’s brilliance as it goes on.
The individual stories of the girls are where this starts to unravel, as they are all told with the same pacing and tone, with no variations in speech pattern even though they are different ethnicities and even a different species. The bloodthirsty revenge the women want doesn’t seem to fit as their intensity never changes once they regain their memories, save for Yinka who becomes depressed. This and a lack of motivation for many characters makes the bonfire scene incredibly anticlimactic.
The MC then completely loses the qualities that make her stand out in the beginning, so by the end she is reduced to a weak woman trying to hold onto someone not worth holding onto. She lets Lily dictate her life and possibly eternal death for fear of losing her, but to stay with her after everything she does is lunacy. To bind yourself to someone who wanted to risk losing you forever for one moment of vengeance is unimaginable, yet Jac acquiesces.
By the time the ending comes around it seemed like Knowles just wanted a neat way to tidy things up; however, it was entirely too rushed and forced, making it incongruous with the bewitching beginning half of the story. It’s terribly unfortunate.
A huge issue I have with this novelette is that the first page after the dedication says, “Content warnings are provided at the end of this book”. Why would you place content warnings at the END of a book, especially when some of them could be very triggering? It makes zero sense to have something that may be a triggering issue for someone to place the list at the end of the book. I hope that is changed in the future.
Another minor issue is that Jac frequently braids her hair, and Lucinda appears with braided hair, which is not keeping with the mythos. It’s even stated by Lucinda the evening before green week that they need not plait their hair to blend in, so this seems odd that two characters would wear braids in the story, especially Lucinda. Then Jac goes to tie up her hair in the middle of the festival but Lily instead braids it for her. Even with Jac presenting more masculine, she is still a rusalka and their hair was always unbound.
Little things like this being incongruous with the folklore or details about the Adriatic Sea being icy (it’s not), are or what took me out of the story each time, which is a shame. Rae Knowles has a gift as a storyteller, it just needs some focus and fact checking at times which is missing here. It needed more editing or beta readers to catch the little details that slipped the author’s attention.
It’s regrettable that the middle became so cloudy and the end so rushed as the start of the novelette was aesthetically exquisite.
**Thematic Spoilers**
Merciless Waters is centered around the Slavic myth of Rusalka, undead female water dwelling entities who were drowned, either by violent force or by suicide. Usually men are to blame for their demise, though not always.
They must live out their designated time on Earth as rusalki, luring men into the water where they died using their enchanting voices and beautiful appearance, and then drowning the men by entwining their long hair around their feet and becoming slippery so they could not breach the surface. Some would even tickle the men and laugh as they choked on the water and died. The rusalki are thought to only come completely out of the water during certain times of the year (early June is known as Rusalka week, Rusalnaya or green week) or in summer, and can then be seen sitting on docks or on the decks of ships, or even to lounge in the boughs of trees. They may only eternally rest if their deaths are avenged.
The name of their ship was a creative nod to Greek mythology; Scylla was a fair maiden who was turned into a terrifying sea monster, with the upper body of a beautiful woman and the lower half an abomination of nightmare material; “A goddess above and a monster below”, which is how Jac describes Lily in the water. There are various accounts as to how this occurred, but they all have one central motive-jealousy.
All said, this has so much potential and the gorgeous first half is why I will give this a 3/5 stars. Hopefully the author takes note and makes some revisions.
Thank you to Net Galley for access to an ARC for an unbiased review.
“Merciless Waters” weaves mythology into a beautiful and haunting tale of a group of women sailing aimlessly on the sea on their ship Scylla, when they rescue a man from drowning. Knowles has crafted a gorgeously written sapphic novelette with rich, eloquent prose that tells a tale of love, loss, jealousy, memory, sisterhood, and vengeance. Achingly exquisite at times, this novel starts off so strongly but unfortunately loses it’s brilliance as it goes on.
The individual stories of the girls are where this starts to unravel, as they are all told with the same pacing and tone, with no variations in speech pattern even though they are different ethnicities and even a different species. The bloodthirsty revenge the women want doesn’t seem to fit as their intensity never changes once they regain their memories, save for Yinka who becomes depressed. This and a lack of motivation for many characters makes the bonfire scene incredibly anticlimactic.
The MC then completely loses the qualities that make her stand out in the beginning, so by the end she is reduced to a weak woman trying to hold onto someone not worth holding onto. She lets Lily dictate her life and possibly eternal death for fear of losing her, but to stay with her after everything she does is lunacy. To bind yourself to someone who wanted to risk losing you forever for one moment of vengeance is unimaginable, yet Jac acquiesces.
By the time the ending comes around it seemed like Knowles just wanted a neat way to tidy things up; however, it was entirely too rushed and forced, making it incongruous with the bewitching beginning half of the story. It’s terribly unfortunate.
A huge issue I have with this novelette is that the first page after the dedication says, “Content warnings are provided at the end of this book”. Why would you place content warnings at the END of a book, especially when some of them could be very triggering? It makes zero sense to have something that may be a triggering issue for someone to place the list at the end of the book. I hope that is changed in the future.
Another minor issue is that Jac frequently braids her hair, and Lucinda appears with braided hair, which is not keeping with the mythos. It’s even stated by Lucinda the evening before green week that they need not plait their hair to blend in, so this seems odd that two characters would wear braids in the story, especially Lucinda. Then Jac goes to tie up her hair in the middle of the festival but Lily instead braids it for her. Even with Jac presenting more masculine, she is still a rusalka and their hair was always unbound.
Little things like this being incongruous with the folklore or details about the Adriatic Sea being icy (it’s not), are or what took me out of the story each time, which is a shame. Rae Knowles has a gift as a storyteller, it just needs some focus and fact checking at times which is missing here. It needed more editing or beta readers to catch the little details that slipped the author’s attention.
It’s regrettable that the middle became so cloudy and the end so rushed as the start of the novelette was aesthetically exquisite.
**Thematic Spoilers**
Merciless Waters is centered around the Slavic myth of Rusalka, undead female water dwelling entities who were drowned, either by violent force or by suicide. Usually men are to blame for their demise, though not always.
They must live out their designated time on Earth as rusalki, luring men into the water where they died using their enchanting voices and beautiful appearance, and then drowning the men by entwining their long hair around their feet and becoming slippery so they could not breach the surface. Some would even tickle the men and laugh as they choked on the water and died. The rusalki are thought to only come completely out of the water during certain times of the year (early June is known as Rusalka week, Rusalnaya or green week) or in summer, and can then be seen sitting on docks or on the decks of ships, or even to lounge in the boughs of trees. They may only eternally rest if their deaths are avenged.
The name of their ship was a creative nod to Greek mythology; Scylla was a fair maiden who was turned into a terrifying sea monster, with the upper body of a beautiful woman and the lower half an abomination of nightmare material; “A goddess above and a monster below”, which is how Jac describes Lily in the water. There are various accounts as to how this occurred, but they all have one central motive-jealousy.
All said, this has so much potential and the gorgeous first half is why I will give this a 3/5 stars. Hopefully the author takes note and makes some revisions.
Thank you to Net Galley for access to an ARC for an unbiased review.