#Interview with Julie Catherine, Author of #NewRelease Cruel and Splendid Mermaid #Fantasy #DarkFantasy

Cruel and Splendid Mermaids (Broken Mermaids, #1) by Julie Catherine released October 17th 2023 in the Adult, Dark Fantasy, Fantasy genre.

For mermaids and humans, the rules are the same: be careful around strangers, be wary of magic and before you dive in, check what’s lurking under the waves.

Nineteen-year-old Ellara Merme’s whole life she’s known one purpose: to mate with men, to procreate, and to bear offspring to fight in Neptune’s underwater army. No problem… There’s just one hiccup. Her siren song doesn’t work.

No one can know.

She’s a broken mermaid with a faulty lure and she has only one week left to make the damaged song work. But all that can change with the ocean’s next deadly storm. Dragged from a shipwreck, mythology says a rescued sailor will be so grateful he’ll fall into anyone’s arms. Even a broken mermaid’s. Still, there’s a reason why merfolk and humans don’t get along. And a lot can go wrong when a girl from the ocean washes up on the shore.

Think mating is easy? Think again.

Cruel and Splendid Mermaids is a first-person dark and playful underwater fantasy. Book one in the Broken Mermaids series.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/194943938-cruel-and-splendid-mermaids

Purchase:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/46PdoNi

AUTHOR BIO:

Julie Catherine is an author, screenwriter and playwright.

Can she tell us about the series as a whole?

Cruel and Splendid Mermaids is book one in the Broken Mermaids series. I was inspired to write the first book in the Broken Mermaid series when I started to think about mermaids and how they exist in mythology. It seems their primary purpose is to look desirable and/or possibly lure men… but why? And do they actually enjoy the results when their luring works? So those were the ideas I wanted to explore.

I decided to build out a mermaid culture that has some drastic differences from human society, starting with the role of mermen. When they’re babies, all the men in the ocean are shipped off as soldiers in a far off war, so the community underwater is all women. In all roles. And for some of them, their job is to go ashore and lure men like the lore says. They are the most privileged of all the mermaids. They enjoy their jobs. It’s a desired position with lots of perks.

From there, Book One asks the next question: what happens when you’re a mermaid who can’t lure like all of your friends? Something’s defective. That’s where Ellara Merme comes in. In Cruel and Splendid Mermaids she’s a Broken Mermaid. Her siren voice doesn’t work, but all she wants to do is succeed and fit in like all of her friends. In fact she needs to, or she’ll be relegated to a lower, less beneficial class. So she hides her broken voice and looks for other ways to succeed at the task. She can do it by mating like a human instead of luring a man with mermaid charms. Only that’s not as easy as it sounds.

For later books in the series, more questions have come up, like what about the mermen?! How are they broken? Going to war when you’re just a tiny tot doesn’t sound great, so rest assured, they’ll be coming next.

There’s a lot of fodder to explore. The underwater world is so unknown and full of danger. As a fantasy author, it’s the perfect place to dig in to a whole array of exciting quests. I called the series Broken Mermaids because when we start the books, we’ve got just one mermaid to heal, but when we dig a little deeper I think it’ll turn out to be a whole society of broken mermaids that still need to be fixed.

Think mating is easy? Think again.