Verdict: A 564-page Scottish sea-myth romance between an ex-nun and the creature who planned to eat her, with enormous yearning and the best prose of Sinclair’s career — undercut by a middle that asks for real patience.
Best for: Readers who want a long, slow, atmospheric romantasy that takes religious trauma seriously, and who will trade plot momentum for interiority and a very late payoff.
Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit open door)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.2/5 — a 4.37 Goodreads average and a Lambda finalist slot, marked down because a third of readers call the pace slow)
Tropes: Slow burn, predator-and-prey, queer awakening, non-human heroine, age gap, religious trauma, forbidden desire, found family, small-town island, dual POV.
The Woman from the Waves by Roslyn Sinclair is a standalone, self-published sapphic paranormal and fantasy romance published in June 2025 and set on Jorsay, a remote island in the Scottish Orkneys, where Madeleine Laurent — an American nun who has just left her convent — goes looking for the stranger who pulled her out of the sea six years ago, and finds Hæra North, an each-uisge who saved her only because she intends to drown and eat her later.
It carries a 4.37 average across 1,782 Goodreads ratings, a 4.27 across 492 on StoryGraph, an A grade from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and a 2026 Lambda Literary Award finalist slot in Lesbian Romance. That is an unusually strong evidence base for an indie title, and the reviews split much less than most books we cover — only 4% of Goodreads ratings sit at one or two stars. But the narrow split is specific, it is about length, and it is worth understanding before you start. We ranked it eighteenth in our guide to spicy sapphic romantasy books.
What Is The Woman from the Waves About?
The Woman from the Waves is a sapphic romantasy built on Scottish folklore rather than the usual courts-and-crowns machinery. The each-uisge is a real figure from Highland legend — a water horse that takes human shape, lures a rider, and drowns them — and Sinclair keeps the predation intact rather than sanding it into a shapeshifter romance. That decision is what gives the book its engine and also what earns it graphic violence and blood among StoryGraph’s content warnings.
Madeleine is introduced through what she has spent her adult life refusing: desire, doubt, and any version of herself that is not a religious vocation. Hæra is introduced through what she assumes — that a human is food, that hunger and love are the same appetite, and that becoming the first female Stormhorse of her clan simply requires the right prey. The book runs on dual POV in third person, which is the only structure that makes the premise bearable, because you watch Hæra decide not to kill Madeleine long before Madeleine knows there was a decision.
What Makes This Sapphic Sea-Myth Romantasy Work
- The mythology: Readers consistently name the each-uisge lore and the Orkney setting as the reason the book does not read like every other romantasy; “immersive” recurs, and so does the sense of a real place.
- The yearning: The two leads spend a six-year gap apart, and reviewers treat that stretch as the book’s best material rather than as filler to be endured.
- Madeleine’s faith arc: The handling of Catholicism, shame and internalised homophobia draws the most careful praise in the reviews, including from readers who say they came to it with their own religious trauma.
- Jonathan: A supporting character readers bring up unprompted, over and over, which is rare enough in romance to be worth naming — the found-family thread runs through him.
- The prose: Sinclair’s line-level writing is the most-praised element across every source, and it is the thing that keeps 564 pages moving for the readers it works for.
Book Synopsis
Six years ago, Sister Madeleine Laurent goes into the water off a remote Scottish island and does not come out on her own. A woman she never gets a proper look at drags her back to shore, and Madeleine spends the following years unable to decide whether she was rescued by a person, a miracle, or something she has no vocabulary for. When she finally leaves the convent, that unfinished question is what she crosses the Atlantic to answer.
Jorsay does not give her the woman she came for. It gives her Hæra North — blunt, physical, indifferent to every social rule Madeleine has organised her life around, and entirely too interested in her. Hæra is an each-uisge, one of a clan of ocean horse spirits, and her ambition is to become the first female Stormhorse her people have had. The qualification is not courage or lineage. It is a worthy human, captured, drowned and eaten. Madeleine was chosen years ago.
So the plan is simple and Hæra keeps repeating it to herself: hold human form, win the woman’s trust, then finish what she started. What she has not accounted for is that trust runs both directions, or that Madeleine — unpractised, unshielded, and newly out of a life built to prevent exactly this — is waking up an appetite of her own. Hunger and love feel identical from the inside. Hæra has never had to tell them apart, and the longer she waits, the less certain she is which one she is feeling.
My Review
The premise is the best thing I have read in sapphic romantasy this year, and it works because Sinclair refuses to defang it. Hæra is not a misunderstood creature with a soft centre; she is a predator who has selected a meal and then keeps failing to eat it, and the book makes you sit inside that head while she works out why. Most romantasy that promises a monster delivers a tall person with unusual eyes. This one delivers an actual appetite, and the romance is genuinely about the difference between wanting to consume someone and wanting to keep them.
The second real strength is Madeleine, and specifically the religious material. A former nun losing her faith and finding her sexuality is a setup that goes wrong in about four predictable ways, and Sinclair avoids all of them — the church is not a cartoon, the leaving is not clean, and the shame does not evaporate the moment she is kissed. Tara Scott’s A-grade review at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books lands on the same thing, and multiple Goodreads reviewers say the Catholicism is handled with more care than they expected. It is the most emotionally credible part of the book.
Where it struggles is length, and this is not my preference talking — it is the one complaint that recurs across every source I checked. The ebook runs 564 pages and the print edition is longer still. On StoryGraph, 31% of readers rate the pace slow against 3% who call it fast, and the did-not-finish rate is 7%, which is high; the only book I have reviewed here with a higher one is Her Spell That Binds Me at 9%. The mechanism readers name is interiority: one three-star reviewer calls it “an absolute metric ton of internal monologue,” and several others describe the middle third as two women thinking about each other in separate rooms. A late-book twist divides opinion further, with a handful of readers accepting its logic and disliking it anyway.
One expectation to reset. The packaging and the predator premise suggest dark fantasy, and 31% of StoryGraph readers do log it as dark — but the darkness is atmospheric and thematic rather than brutal. StoryGraph’s graphic warnings are sexual content, violence and blood, with homophobia and animal death at moderate. There is no torture, no on-page cruelty for its own sake, and the book is far more interested in shame than in gore. If “she plans to eat her” is what drew you, know that the book is a slow character study first. If it is what worried you, relax.
My honest note: A five-star concept and five-star prose inside a book that is roughly a hundred pages longer than its plot. If you read for interiority and atmosphere, this is one of the best sapphic romantasies of the last two years. If you need forward motion, the middle will lose you.
| Element | In The Woman from the Waves |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Madeleine Laurent & Hæra North — ex-nun and each-uisge, predator-and-prey to lovers |
| Core tropes | Slow burn, queer awakening, non-human heroine, age gap, religious trauma, found family, dual POV |
| Setting | Jorsay, a remote island in Scotland’s Orkneys, with a US Mid-Atlantic convent behind it |
| Heat level | 4/5 — explicit open door |
| Series | Standalone — complete arc, an HEA, and no sequel announced |
| Content notes | Graphic sexual content, violence and blood; homophobia, animal death and death of a parent; addiction, gun violence and sexual violence at the minor level; religious trauma and internalised homophobia throughout |
How Dark and Spicy Is The Woman from the Waves?
A 4/5. romance.io places it in its “explicit open door” band — one step below the top — and reader reports match that precisely: the sex is on the page, described at length, and there is a decent amount of it, but it is not the constant presence a top-band rating implies. The thing to know in advance is timing. This is a genuine slow burn across a very long book, and the wait is real; readers who want heat early will spend a lot of pages waiting for it, and readers who want the yearning drawn out get exactly what they came for.
On darkness, the element worth flagging is not a kink but the premise itself: Hæra spends a large part of the book intending to kill and eat the woman she is falling for, and she is honest about it in her own POV. No reviewer I found flags anything beyond that, and no one names specific kink content. If you want the same register a band hotter, Her Spell That Binds Me and Tryst Six Venom both sit in romance.io’s top “explicit and plentiful” band.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you read for prose and atmosphere above plot, you want folklore that keeps its teeth, you want religious trauma written with care rather than as a punchline, and you actively enjoy a long slow burn.
You may want to skip it if: you need a book to move, you find extended internal monologue tedious, you want spice early and often, or 564 pages of a single romance sounds like a chore before you start.
In short: one of the best-written sapphic romantasies going, at a length that will either be the point or the problem.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
This book is not living on a viral moment, and it does not need one. What it has is institutional validation that indie sapphic romance almost never gets: a finalist slot in Lesbian Romance at the 38th Lambda Literary Awards in 2026, alongside titles from St. Martin’s and other traditional houses. It lost to Ladies in Hating by Alexandra Vasti. I found no Kirkus, Publishers Weekly or Library Journal review — unsurprising for a self-published title — but Smart Bitches, Trashy Books graded it an A and The Lesbian Review covered it. Reddit was unreachable from here, so I cannot report on its footprint there either way. Meanwhile the numbers keep climbing: 6,050 Goodreads users have it on their want-to-read shelf and 639 are reading it right now, over a year after publication, which is Kindle Unlimited and word of mouth doing the work. The real accelerant is audio. Tantor Media licensed it and released the audiobook on 30 June 2026, narrated by Ruth Urquhart across 18 hours 39 minutes.
Prefer audio? Listen to The Woman from the Waves on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
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Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The prose, first and most consistently — readers who have read Sinclair’s earlier contemporary and sci-fi work say plainly that this is a step up. Then the mythology and the Orkney setting; “immersive” is the recurring word and several readers describe wanting to stay in the world after finishing. Then the yearning, which readers treat as the point rather than the delay. Madeleine’s faith arc draws the most thoughtful praise, including from readers with Catholic backgrounds of their own. Jonathan, the main supporting character, gets named repeatedly and affectionately, which is genuinely unusual. And Urquhart’s narration has become its own draw — listeners single out her Scottish accent work, and at least one reader who found the print version middling reports preferring the audio.
What readers argue about and complain about: Length, above everything, and it is the only complaint that clears the bar for a theme. The book is 564 pages in ebook and readers who did not finish it give length and pace as the reason; StoryGraph logs a 7% did-not-finish rate with 31% calling the pace slow. Second is the mechanism behind that: interior monologue. Multiple reviewers describe long stretches of both women thinking rather than interacting, and several say they wanted more direct contact between the leads in the middle third. Third, and smaller, is a late-book twist that a minority disliked while conceding it was set up honestly, plus a few readers who felt a couple of plot resolutions leaned on coincidence. The one-star reviews are thin on the ground — 20 of them out of 1,782 ratings — and one StoryGraph reader who stopped at 39% simply found both leads insufferable, which is a single voice rather than a pattern. Opinions genuinely divide on whether the six-year separation is the book’s most romantic stretch or its dead zone.
The standalone question worth asking first: it resolves. This is a standalone with a complete arc and a happily-ever-after, no sequel has been announced, and you need nothing else to read it. Where it gets interesting is the backlist, because Sinclair has one and it is not uniform. Her highest-rated book is Above All Things (Carlisle #2) at 4.50 across roughly 4,400 Goodreads ratings, while her most-read title, The X Ingredient, sits at 3.97 across about 6,000 — nearly half a star below this one. The Carlisle series is contemporary and, as readers themselves point out, unmistakably rooted in The Devil Wears Prada. The Woman from the Waves is her first fantasy and her first fully independent release, and on the evidence it is also her best book.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The Woman from the Waves end on a cliffhanger?
No. It is a standalone with a complete arc and a happily-ever-after for Madeleine and Hæra, and no sequel has been announced. You can read it and stop.
How spicy is The Woman from the Waves?
A 4/5. romance.io rates the steam level “explicit open door,” one band below its highest. The scenes are graphic and on the page, but this is a long slow burn and the wait before the first one is substantial.
Is there an audiobook?
Yes. Tantor Media released it on 30 June 2026, narrated by Ruth Urquhart, running 18 hours 39 minutes. Listeners consistently praise her Scottish accent work, and some readers prefer the audio to the page.
Do I need to read Roslyn Sinclair’s other books first?
No. This is her first fantasy romance and it shares no world or characters with the Carlisle series or her earlier titles. It is a completely fresh starting point.
Is The Woman from the Waves too long?
It depends on what you read for. The ebook is 564 pages, StoryGraph logs a 7% did-not-finish rate, and 31% of readers rate the pace slow — but the majority who finish it rate it highly, at 4.37 on Goodreads.
Is it actually dark fantasy?
Partly. The premise is predatory and StoryGraph flags violence and blood as graphic, with 31% of readers logging the book as dark. But there is no torture or gore, and the emotional weight sits on shame and faith rather than brutality.
If You Loved The Woman from the Waves, Read These Next
If the romantasy register is the draw and you want it hotter and shorter, Her Spell That Binds Me runs a magical-school rivalry at romance.io’s top heat band. If it is the obsessive, predatory intensity you want in a contemporary setting with no fantasy at all, Tryst Six Venom is the same fixation without the folklore. We do not have a review up yet for a non-human-heroine title in the same band, so for that thread browse our paranormal and fantasy lesbian romance category instead, or the complete spicy sapphic romantasy reading list and the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
The Woman from the Waves sets out to write a monster romance where the monster stays a monster, and it succeeds. The folklore has teeth, the prose is the best of Sinclair’s career, and Madeleine’s loss of faith is handled with a seriousness the subgenre rarely attempts. It is also very long, structurally slack through its middle, and heavily weighted toward interior monologue at the expense of scenes where the two women are actually in a room together. Whether that trade works depends on one question: do you read romance for momentum or for immersion? Immersion readers are getting a Lambda finalist and one of the strongest sapphic romantasies of the last two years. Check The Woman from the Waves on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, The Woman from the Waves ranks as a literary indie sapphic romantasy — beautifully written and mythologically serious, held back by length, and best approached for the yearning and the folklore rather than the plot.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 4.2/5
- ✓ 4.37 average across 1,782 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ 2026 Lambda Literary Award finalist
- ✓ Only 4% of ratings at one or two stars
- ✓ 7% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph
Romance ★★★★★ 4.5/5
- ✓ Predator-and-prey premise kept genuinely dangerous
- ✓ Yearning is the most-praised element
- ✓ Dual POV earns the six-year separation
- ✓ Readers wanted more direct contact mid-book
Characters ★★★★★ 4.6/5
- ✓ 96% log strong character development on StoryGraph
- ✓ Jonathan named repeatedly by reviewers
- ✓ Madeleine’s faith arc credibly unresolved
- ✓ 18% say the cast is not diverse
Writing ★★★★☆ 4.4/5
- ✓ Prose the most consistent praise across sources
- ✓ A grade from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
- ✓ Orkney setting rendered with real specificity
- ✓ Internal monologue volume flagged repeatedly
Emotional Impact ★★★★★ 4.5/5
- ✓ 90% of StoryGraph readers log it emotional
- ✓ Religious shame written without caricature
- ✓ Found family through Jonathan lands
- ✓ Slow middle dilutes accumulated tension
Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ romance.io band: explicit open door
- ✓ Scenes described at length, not skipped
- ✓ Desire is the book’s actual subject
- ✓ Very long wait before the first one
Ending ★★★★☆ 4.2/5
- ✓ Complete standalone arc, no cliffhanger
- ✓ Earned HEA after a long build
- ✓ Nothing further required to read it
- ✓ Late twist divides a vocal minority
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4.3/5
- ✓ Urquhart audiobook is a strong second pass
- ✓ Reviewers reporting 2026 rereads already
- ✓ Atmosphere rewards a slower return
- ✓ 564 pages discourage a casual reread
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