Review: Elijah's Mermaid by Essie Fox

Rating: 3.5/5

The cover on this is unusual, with a weathered green background and white detail of mermaids and seahorses.

In all honesty, I nearly gave up on reading this once I’d met Lily the first time. I found her very childish and immature to start with, which got boring. However, I’m very glad I stuck with it.  Whilst the first part of the book seemed slow, the middle and last parts in comparison are fast paced, with a lot of things going on.  Some parts blew my mind away with how emotionally charged they were.

There were also some very good hidden plot twists that took my breath away. This turned into a must read book which had me eager to turn the next page to find out what drama happened next.

Elijah’s Mermaid is full of unbidden love and has plenty of dark, sinister and unusual characters.  I loathe Oswald Black, who cares for nothing but himself and his creations, even at the expense of life and health.  Essie Fox has made one heck of a bad guy with him!

Frederick Hall is a character we don’t understand in full until later in the book.  I was astounded to find out that in Victorian England the age of consent was just 13!!

Pearl is the one character in this who has a complete strength of character throughout the book, it’s a wonder she didn’t go mad.

Overall, I was pleased I’d kept with the book, just a shame that I wasn’t as convinced in the first part.

Book synopsis:
Since she was found as a baby, floating in the Thames one foggy night, the web-toed Pearl has been brought up in a brothel known as the House of Mermaids. Cosseted and pampered there, it is only when her fourteenth birthday approaches that Pearl realises she is to be sold to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, the orphaned twins, Lily and Elijah, have shared an idyllic childhood, raised in a secluded country house with their grandfather, Augustus Lamb. But when Lily and Elijah go on a visit London, a chance meeting with the ethereal Pearl will have repercussions for all of them, binding their fates together in a dark and dangerous way…In this bewitching, sensual novel, Essie Fox has written another tale of obsessive love and betrayal, moving from the respectable worlds of Victorian art and literature, and into the shadowy demi-monde of brothels, asylums and freak show tents – a world in which nothing and no-one is quite what they seem to be.

Source – many thanks to the publisher, a copy was received in return for an honest review.