If I could recommend any book to you, it would be this one.

‘The Surface Breaks’ by Louise O’Neill is a retelling of a story you probably already know; The Little Mermaid. However, The Little Mermaid is a story meant for kids, so everything is beautiful, and everyone lives happily ever after. You remember sweet little Ariel, combing her hair with a fork and singing with the crawfish? Now scratch that memory, because this story is a little different.

On the back of my copy of the book, there’s a sticker that says ‘Contains adult themes and may be unsuitable for younger readers’, which is very much true for this book. But, as we are probably not considered ‘younger readers’, we can proceed safely with this book.

In this book we follow the story of Gaia, the ‘Ariel’ of this story. Gaia is a sweet, innocent young girl whose mother abandoned her for her interest of the human world. Because of this, she is deeply attracted to the human world as well. She collects the trinkets from the humans that she can find on the ocean floor. Her father does not want her to connect with the humans. He says her mother died at the human's hands because of her obsession to reside with them. Gaia dreams of freedom from her controlling father, so she keeps going to the surface of the water to see the humans. On one of her trips, she is drawn towards a human boy. Gaia longs to join his carefree world, so she goes to the sea witch to change her mermaid fin into legs. But how much more will she have to sacrifice? What will it take for her to find her ‘happy ending’?

That’s all I’m going to tell you about this story. You’ll have to find out the rest yourself, because I don’t want to spoil the joy of discovering this book for you.

One final thing to add. There are mentions of sexual assault in this book, so if that is not something that you can read/hear about, I wouldn’t read this book.