The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan is a dreamy, but at the same time grimly post-apocalyptic (yes, a grim post-apocalypse can be dreamy too, as it turns out!) novel about a flooded world, where people live on boats or the remains of the landmass that they worship, and sometimes, by accident, have sex with merfolk, giving birth to creatures somewhere inbetween that are mostly hated.
In this sense it is a tale about one’s identity and being different. I choose to interpret merfolk as queer people here, same as in H. C. Andersen’s Little Mermaid or Oscar Wilde’s Fisherman and His Soul.
And The Gracekeepers does feel like a fairy tale for adults. Its plot has a make-believe quality, which allows you to poke holes in the logic of it, but also lets you easily accept it, because that’s how the tale flows.
However, despite the beautiful, weird world described by Logan, I feel like the tale couldn’t go beyond this dreamy image into something more defined and concrete. There is an abundance of viewpoints, but only one character has real substance, whereas I have a feeling that there were at least two characters marked as the main ones. If the second character was more developed, the ending might not have seemed that rushed.
I won’t be keeping this book, I think, although the images created by Logan will stay with me for a long time - there is a sailing circus and a quiet ocean graveyard on the equator!
Despite too much flow and dilution, the story is still beautiful, and is a perfect summer read with lots of water imagery.