The Siren, the Song, and the Spy, the companion novel to Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s first book in this fantasy world, The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, is about loss and attempted redemption, about the atrocities wrought by empires, and about the cyclical horrors that humanity inflicts on itself and the environment.
It is also—buffered by Tokuda-Hall’s emotive prose—a compelling tale about a handful of characters trying to topple a brutal, oppressive empire while trying to stay alive. The book is told from multiple points of view, but the four main ones are Genevieve, a young woman indoctrinated by the Empire who realizes that the force she thought was just for most of her life is, in fact, the opposite; Koa and Kaia, siblings of the Wariuta people, islanders with hyena familiars who have yet to be yoked by the Empire; and Alfie, a young man who is aiding the pirates rebelling against the Empire by working undercover in the palace.
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