Every generation before had a semblance of chance, but we have the end of the world. This end of the world. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, and I wish we could think of a future without a thousand ways of how we must change to endure it.
Nhung, known as Noon, lives on a boat with her mother, making a living by selling the sometimes-mutated fish they catch. Hurricane Arlene took Noon's father and brother, and flooded Mercy, Louisiana: it also left behind a toxic bloom of weird red algae, and there have been sightings of strange sea creatures and reports of missing persons. When a marine biologist goes missing, Noon -- along with Covey, the daughter of the town's big boss -- is tasked with capturing a monster. Any monster.
Noon herself has been changing for months. After a sexual assault, her hair turned white overnight, and she's losing her fingernails. She no longer feels at home in her body. Is she a monster? What has triggered her transformation -- the assault, or something in the water?
Noon is very much alone: she's frustrated by her mother's certainty that the sea will reincarnate her lost husband and son, perhaps as sea creatures, and there's an undercurrent of lingering resentment that, as a girl, Noon was always second best. Later, she reconnects with an old friend, Wilder, and Wilder's new friend Saffy, who is trans. There's a tentative friendship blooming with Covey, too: an accomplished huntress, yes, but also a young woman rejecting her big-boss father and everything he stands for. And ultimately Noon comes to understand, and to reconcile herself to, her mother's beliefs ... and their roots in the family history.
This is as much a novel about becoming your true self as it is about the ecological, social and economic changes wrought by the hurricane and the algae. There's some stomach-turning body horror, and a pervasive sense of unease: Tran evokes the smells, sounds and motion of Noon's world with vivid sensory detail. I found Noon's prickliness very relatable, and was captivated by the ways in which various mermaid stories (not the Disney versions) were woven into Noon's story.
I read the audiobook, narrated by Nhi Do, who managed some truly unsettling vocal effects.
Read because: it was on offer at Libro.fm, and the Libro.fm 2026 Audiobook Listening Challenge has a prompt for 'a winning audiobook from our 2025 Bookseller Choice Awards': as I read, I decided it also fitted 'a BIPOC retelling of a fairytale', for the original Little Mermaid.
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