The Seafarer's Kiss Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A sharp, genuinely original Norse-myth Little Mermaid with a bisexual mermaid, a lesbian shieldmaiden and Loki as the sea witch, let down by a 224-page length that leaves the romance and the characters underbuilt.

Best for: Readers who want a fast, icy, feminist fairy-tale retelling with sapphic longing at its centre, and who can forgive thin characterisation and one romance beat that many readers found hard to swallow.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — no romance.io steam band; young adult, sensual but not explicit)

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.3/5 — a 3.61 Goodreads average, with readers and Kirkus agreeing the characters are too thin)

Tropes: Fairy-tale retelling, forbidden love, human and mermaid, bargain with a god, one-sided love triangle, exile, found crew, feminist rebellion, Norse mythology, first love.

The Seafarer’s Kiss by Julia Ember is the first book of a two-book series, a young adult sapphic fantasy published in 2017 by Duet, the YA imprint of Interlude Press — a Little Mermaid retelling moved to the Arctic, where a mermaid named Ersel, raised in a kingdom that measures her worth by her fertility, pulls a stranded shieldmaiden out of the ice and decides the girl is worth defying her king for.

It holds a 3.61 average across 1,627 Goodreads ratings, and School Library Journal and Kirkus both reviewed it. Almost nobody disputes the premise; the reviews split over whether a short book did it justice, and over one scene in particular. Both halves of that are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Seafarer’s Kiss About?

The Seafarer’s Kiss is a fairy-tale retelling first and a romance second, and it helps to read it that way. It takes the bones of Hans Christian Andersen’s story — the curious mermaid, the rescued human, the bargain for legs — and sets them among glacial caves, whaling ships and beluga whales. Norse mythology replaces the sea witch with Loki, and the merfolk society is a dying patriarchy in which women are valued for how many children they can produce. That gives the book a feminist edge the source never had.

Ersel is nineteen, restless and bisexual, and she has spent years dreaming of a world beyond the ice shelf that her best friend Havamal once promised to escape to with her before he joined the king’s guard instead. Ragna is a shieldmaiden washed up on the glacier, a fighter from the world Ersel has only seen in shipwrecks, and the character several readers liked best. The story is told in Ersel’s first-person voice only, which keeps it tight and fast but means Ragna is seen from the outside for the whole book.

What Makes This Sapphic Fairy-Tale Retelling Work

The retelling itself: This is the most-praised element by a distance. Several readers call it one of the cleverest Little Mermaid variations they have read, because the plot beats line up with the original while the angle makes it feel new.
The Arctic setting: Readers like that it trades the tropical mermaid cliché for ice caves, cold water and belugas — at least one reviewer names the whales as the best part of the book.
Ersel as an Ursula figure: Readers keep noticing that this is the sea witch’s origin story as much as the mermaid’s, and it is the twist many of them name first.
The feminist frame: The fertility-obsessed kingdom gives the forbidden love story real stakes, and at least one reader compares the society to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Representation: Own-voices bisexual representation, a lesbian love interest, a fat heroine and a genderfluid Loki who uses they/them pronouns, which readers single out and mostly praise.

Book Synopsis

Beneath the Arctic ice, the merfolk live in a fortress of glacial caves under a king who rules through fear. The mermaids are rarer every year and fewer of them can bear children, so the court has decided that producing the next generation is the only thing a mermaid is for. Ersel has other plans. She collects the relics of human shipwrecks, studies a world she is forbidden to visit, and has no intention of choosing a mate.

Then a human girl turns up stranded on the glacier. Ragna is a shieldmaiden, half-frozen and far from home, and Ersel keeps her alive in secret. The meetings turn into something neither of them expected. When Havamal — Ersel’s oldest friend, now a guard, and a merman who has his own hopes about her future — discovers them together, he gives her a choice: let the human go, or answer to the king.

Ersel refuses to accept either option. She goes looking for the one power in the northern sea that might offer her a way out, and finds Loki, who is willing to make a deal for a price. Deals with the god of lies are never quite what they seem, and this one costs Ersel the only home she has known. Exiled and changed, she has to work out whether she can reach Ragna again — and whether she can outwit a trickster god who always seems to be a step ahead of her.

My Review

The concept here is excellent, and I want to say it first because most of what follows is qualified. A Little Mermaid in which the sailor is a shieldmaiden, the sea witch is Loki and the mermaid is the one who ends up with the tentacles is the kind of idea that makes you want to read the book, and Ember commits to it. The retelling is clever without being coy: the plot beats you know are all there, bent just far enough that you stop predicting them. Readers who expected a retelling to be predictable keep saying it was not.

The world is the other real pleasure. The glacial fortress, the cold water, the whaling ships and the belugas give this a texture most mermaid books do not have, and the fertility-obsessed court turns a fairy tale into a story about bodily autonomy without ever preaching. More than half of StoryGraph readers mark it fast-paced, and at 224 pages it moves.

Where it struggles is depth, and that is not my personal gripe — it is the most consistent criticism in the reviews, and Kirkus reached the same verdict independently, saying the characters lack the emotional depth to be compelling. Several readers say outright that there are not enough pages for the ideas: side plots surface and vanish, the middle sags, and the ending wraps up too neatly. Ersel divides people. Some find her independence refreshing; others find her selfish and too fond of reminding everyone that she is not like other mermaids. School Library Journal, otherwise positive, calls the writing clumsy at times.

The expectation to reset is the romance. The cover and the title sell a love story, but this reads as a fairy tale with a romance inside it, and Ersel and Ragna spend less time together than the premise suggests — Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which liked the book, makes exactly that point. Then there is the scene in which the two of them hit each other in the face and grow closer for it, which readers discuss more than anything else in the book. If you came for the retelling, relax; if you came for a slow-building sapphic romance, calibrate.

My honest note: A great fairy-tale idea on a shorter page count than it needed. If you want a fast Norse retelling with a sapphic heart, it delivers. If you need a romance that earns every beat, this one skips several.

Element	In The Seafarer’s Kiss
Central relationship	Ersel & Ragna — a bisexual mermaid and a lesbian shieldmaiden, forbidden human-and-merfolk love
Core tropes	Little Mermaid retelling, forbidden love, bargain with a god, one-sided love triangle, exile, Norse mythology
Setting	A merfolk fortress under the Arctic ice and the Norse seas above it
Heat level	2/5 — young adult; sensual, not explicit
Series	The Seafarer’s Kiss book 1 of 2 — resolves its own story; sequel The Navigator’s Touch (2018) follows Ragna
Content notes	Misogyny and sexism, infertility framed as being “broken”, sexual assault, confinement, pregnancy, violence between the romantic leads, mild sexual content

How Spicy Is The Seafarer’s Kiss?

A 2/5. romance.io lists the book but gives it no steam rating, which fits a title published as young adult — Amazon sets the reading age at 13 to 17, Kirkus at 14 to adult. The actual heat sits a little above most YA. School Library Journal calls the same-sex romance steamy, and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books notes an intimate scene that happens off the page. StoryGraph readers tag sexual content as minor, and nobody describes anything explicit.

The thing worth flagging in advance is not sex but violence. Midway through, Ersel and Ragna punch each other during an argument and the relationship deepens afterwards without the book examining it. More than one reader treats it as a dealbreaker in a YA romance; no reviewer flags anything beyond it. For sapphic YA fantasy at a similar low heat, Of Fire and Stars and Girls of Paper and Fire sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you collect fairy-tale retellings, you want Norse mythology and an Arctic setting instead of tropical seas, you like a fast book you can finish in an evening, and you want bisexual and fat representation in a YA fantasy lead.

You may want to skip it if: you need deep characterisation, you want a romance with plenty of time between the leads, a heroine with a selfish streak will grate on you, or violence between love interests is a hard line.

In short: a brilliant retelling premise, told briskly and a little thinly, with one romance beat you should know about in advance.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is a 2017 backlist title, and there is no live discourse to speak of — no viral moment, no BookTok presence I could find, and a web search for the title with TikTok returns only older BookTube reviews and blog posts. I could not check Reddit, which was unreachable from here, so I cannot say whether it has a footprint there. What it does have is a small, steady readership: 1,627 Goodreads ratings and 738 reviews on StoryGraph at 3.51. Its launch coverage came largely from BookTube and book bloggers in 2017, including ARC readers, and there is no audiobook edition I could find on Audible or Libro.fm.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The retelling, first and most consistently — “clever” comes up again and again, and at least two readers call it their favourite or one of the most inventive Little Mermaid variations. Then the icy Norse setting and the belugas. The feminist critique of the fertility-obsessed kingdom draws real admiration, and many readers single out the representation — Ersel’s own-voices bisexuality, her body, and Loki as a genderfluid trickster. The pace gets named as a strength by people who read it in one sitting. Samantha Shannon and Heidi Heilig both praised it in blurbs.

What readers argue about and complain about: The punch, above everything. The top review on the book’s Goodreads page cuts its rating specifically because the leads hit each other and the book never treats it as wrong, and at least three other independent reviewers — including a one-star review — raise the same scene. Second: length. Multiple readers say it needed more pages, that characters stay flat and that the second half of the romance feels rushed; Kirkus agrees on characterisation, and SLJ notes clumsy writing. Neither trade review mentions the punch, which is the thing readers will not stop mentioning. Third: Ersel herself, whom several reviewers call selfish or dismissive of other mermaids. Readers also flag the language describing infertile mermaids as “broken”, though some note the book challenges it. The genuine split is Loki: one reader found the they/them pronouns confusing and another reports seeing criticism of the non-binary representation, while a genderfluid reader wrote specifically to defend it. The love triangle with Havamal is described as one-sided.

The series question everyone should ask first: book one resolves its own story, and romance.io tags it as a first-in-series that stands alone. At least one reader says the ending is tidier than the setup earned, but there is no cliffhanger. The sequel, The Navigator’s Touch, came out in September 2018, switches to Ragna’s story, and rates higher at 3.85 across 265 ratings. The duology is complete. If you want to stop after book one, you can.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Seafarer’s Kiss a sapphic book?

Yes. Ersel is a bisexual mermaid, Ragna is a lesbian shieldmaiden, and their relationship is the romance at the centre of the book. There is a one-sided love triangle with Ersel’s childhood friend Havamal, but the story is about the two women.

How spicy is The Seafarer’s Kiss?

A 2/5. It is published as young adult and romance.io gives it no steam rating. School Library Journal calls the romance steamy, but readers report nothing explicit, and the one intimate scene reviewers mention happens off the page.

Does The Seafarer’s Kiss end on a cliffhanger?

No. Book one resolves its own story, and at least one reader thinks the ending ties things up too neatly. The sequel, The Navigator’s Touch, continues with Ragna’s story.

Is The Seafarer’s Kiss series finished?

Yes. It is a duology: The Seafarer’s Kiss (2017) and The Navigator’s Touch (2018). The second book rates higher on Goodreads, at 3.85.

Is there an audiobook of The Seafarer’s Kiss?

Not that I could find. Amazon lists only Kindle and paperback editions, and neither Audible nor Libro.fm has an audio edition as of September 2026.

If You Loved The Seafarer’s Kiss, Read These Next

The top review on this book’s Goodreads page points readers to Of Fire and Stars, a sapphic YA fairy-tale fantasy with a gentler romance and no violence between the leads. If the retelling is what hooked you, Ash reworks Cinderella with the same quiet sapphic turn, and Cinderella Is Dead turns the same feminist anger at a patriarchal kingdom into open revolt.

For more like this, browse our YA sapphic fantasy books list or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Seafarer’s Kiss is a book with a better idea than the space it had to develop it. The Norse Arctic setting is original, the retelling is genuinely clever, and the feminist frame gives a familiar fairy tale something new to say. It is also short on character depth, short on time between its two leads, and carries a violent romance beat it never reckons with. Whether that trade works depends on what you came for — but a reader who wants a fast, icy, sapphic reworking of Andersen gets exactly that in a single evening. Check The Seafarer’s Kiss on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Seafarer’s Kiss ranks as an inventive small-press sapphic YA retelling — original in setting and premise, held back by its length and thin characterisation, and best approached for the Norse fairy tale rather than the romance.