What It Looks Like by Matthew J. Metzger

The prose were as gorgeous as the story, and the voices of the different narrators were so distinct that I never second guessed whose POV I was reading. I won’t say anything else about the end, other than that it worked. I just didn’t know how the heck the characters were going to get there. I suspected – hoped – it would have a happy ending. As soon as I thought I knew how it would happen, something would change to make me second guess where the story was going. I kept hoping for a happy ending, and with every twist and turn, I wondered how the characters were going to overcome the obstacles that stood in front of them. The tension was beautiful, and so was the depiction of two people communicating without words better than many people communicate with them. It was uplifting and validating to read about someone discovering their gender as an adult.įrom that moment forward, I could not put the book the down. She didn’t fit with other mermaids or accept the role women were supposed to play in her society, but it wasn’t until she found herself in the body of a human male that she fully realized she wasn’t a she, but a he. Yes, Calla was oppressed by her controlling father and foiled by her girly sisters.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case in Walking on Water. It’s too easy, when writing women in a misogynistic society, to make women want to be men simply because a society treats them like crap. I admit, I was skeptical of the first two chapters because the book was set in the past, in societies that were even more binary than the modern world, especially for princes like the two mc’s. I asked to review it because I love merfolk stories as long as they are not Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and have been hungry for own voices fantasy featuring trans and non-binary characters. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up an ARC of Walking on Water.

What It Looks Like by Matthew J. Metzger