An award-winning author tells of a mermaid who leaves the sea in search of her landish mother in a captivating tale spun with beautiful prose, lush descriptions, empathy, and keen wit.Blood calls to blood; charm calls to charm.It is the way of the world.Come close and tell us your dreams.Sanna is a mermaid but she is only half seavish. The night of her birth, a sea-witch cast a spell that made Sannas people, including her landish mother, forget how and where she was born. Now Sanna is sixteen and an outsider in the seavish matriarchy, and she is determined to find her mother and learn who she is. She apprentices herself to the witch to learn the magic of making and unmaking, and with a new pair of legs and a quest to complete for her teacher, she follows a clue that leads her ashore on the Thirty-Seven Dark Islands. There, as her fellow mermaids wait in the sea, Sanna stumbles into a wall of white roses thirsty for blood, a hardscrabble people hungry for miracles, and a baroness who will do anything to live forever.From the author of the Michael L. Printz Honor Book The Kingdom of Little Wounds comes a gorgeously told tale of belonging, sacrifice, fear, hope, and mortality.

 

 

This book has been graded for interest at 14 years.

There are 496 pages in this book.

It is aimed at Young Adult readers. The term Young Adult (YA) is used for books which have the following characteristics: (1) aimed at ages 12-18 years, US grades 7-12, UK school years 8-15, (2) around 50-75k words long, (3) main character is aged 12-18 years, (4) topics include self-reflection, internal conflict vs external, analyzing life and its meaning, (5) point of view is often in the first person, and (6) swearing, violence, romance and sexuality are allowed.

This book was published in 2022 by Walker Books Ltd .

Susann Cokal is the author of two adult novels, Mirabilis and Breath and Bones, and her short stories and literary criticisms have been widely published in literary journals and The New York Times Book Review. The Kingdom of Little Wounds is her first novel for young adults and won a 2014 Printz Honor. Currently an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, she lives in Richmond, Virginia, USA.