The Captive Merman's Promise by Zoey Castile

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The 2nd book I picked up for the Love in the Night Readathon was the group book, The Captive Merman's Promise by Zoey Castile. This is the 5th book in the multi-author series Peculiar Tastes. Since it was the group book, it cover most of the prompts: Unique Paranormal, Diving Deep, Eat Her Out, Toil and Trouble and New To You Author. This also worked perfectly to cover the prompts Diverse Main Character or Side Character for Fall in Love, Mint Green (Story You Found Refreshing) for Color Me Romantic and I Put a Spell on you for Bang in the Night. The theme song I chose for The Captive Merman's Promise was The Hurt Doesn't Go Away from the 3rd Volume of Frank Sinatra's Reprise Rarities.

Amada is in Scotland to meet with the Grand Master via the Shadow Market. The women in her family have been cursed, for generations, to love their significant other when there's love involved. After losing a lover of her own, she used her magic to take the entirety of the curse into herself to save future generations. It's starting to act differently than usual and is seeking his help to finally break it. When entering the Shadow Market she comes across Ronan, a merman that's been in service to the Grand Master for years. They find themselves drawn to each other and when the Grand Master isn't able to immediately convince Amada to take his deal, he grants Ronan legs to try to convince her sign the contract.

I had thought about The Little Mermaid when going into this knowing it was a merman romance, but didn't realize that it was more inspired than I knew. I thought it was cleverly done and while it didn't feel too direct as a retelling, there were enough hints to make my Disney-loving heart happy (it was my favorite movie growing up). Overall I thought this was really fun and unique and definitely worth the read. I loved getting the chance to read another mer-person romance and definitely need to try to find more; but back to The Captive Merman's Promise. What brought me down to a 4-star for this was a couple things. The main reason was I just wanted more establishment for not only the magic of this world, but also Ronan's history. I was confused on how Amada's magic worked and what she exactly did to take the curse upon herself. I was also super intrigued and wished that we got more backstory about what happened when he was a merman and not just getting into the horrible contract with the Grand Master. With the magic I was also confused on how exactly the cursed worked. I thought it was supposed to steal the life of the lover when they both were in love, but at the end it was only for the person in love with Amada. It just seemed a little odd to me.

I enjoyed my time and definitely want to look into other books by Zoey Castile. I've had her Happy Endings series on my tbr for a while, but those are contemporary. I definitely have another reason to pick them up since I enjoyed her writing style here. I almost might look into other books from this series, but being that they are by different authors I might have to check tropes and reviews first. I'm definitely intrigued though.

Have you read The Captive Merman's Promise?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: The Captive Merman's Promise, Zoey Castile, 4-stars, 0 days, eBook, 103 pages, published in 2022, indie published