Stepping out of my comfort zone this week and decided to check out a promising new romantasy book that caught my eye. The Trident And The Pearl, by Sarah K.L. Wilson, is essentially a slow-burning romance about the leader of a nation falling in love with Poseidon. I always felt the god of the seas (Called The Fisher in Trident) was an underappreciated part of a balanced pantheon, and I was intrigued by the idea of a deep dive romance with the god of the waves. Will this nautical love story sink or swim? Read on to find out.
Queen Coralys rules the Kingdom of the Five Isles, but when disaster strikes, killing her husband and destroying half her nation, she pleads with the gods for salvation. And they do save her, turning back the terrible winds and tide and snatching her islands from the brink of destruction. In exchange, the gods demand an exchange for their help: Coralys must marry the first man to set foot on her pier. Coralys expects the fleet of a neighboring country to come to rescue her people, led by its prince, a loyal ally. What she gets instead is a fisherman so sunburnt and stinking that her court can barely keep their breakfast down. Unsurprisingly, based on the title, this man is the god of the seas in disguise, and he has come to pull her into a knot of otherworldly political intrigue that she must untangle or drown.
Skipping ahead, I want to say that I ultimately liked this story and do recommend it, but I am going to start with its issues (of which there are two), as I think they inform the rest of my thoughts. The first and biggest one is the dead ex-husband. I think that Wilson’s decision to give Coralys a husband we meet on page one and who dies on page two was a strange choice, and it drags almost every element of this story down. We have no attachment to this off-screen baggage, and his sole purpose in the novel seems to be a clunky tool to add awkward tension and misinformation to numerous scenes.
Early on, we are presented with the implication that Coralys’ new husband, the sea god, vaguely killed her original husband. This fact is used to drive a lot of the tension and conflict in the story, and it absolutely does not make sense. The book presents you with two paths: 1) the new husband did kill the old husband, in which case, what are we doing here? I am not going to buy any relationship that is built on a foundation of spousal murder, so I guess this is a complete waste of time. 2) This implication is a red herring, and there is something else afoot, in which case please, for the love of god stop miscommunicating. It’s taking you two forever to figure stuff out.
Given these complaints, you might think I found the book predictable, but you’d be wrong. The directions that The Trident And The Pearl go are delightfully surprising, eschewing genre tropes to tell a story very much its own. It is part romance, part murder mystery, part political drama, part historical drama, part quest fantasy, and more. The book has so much going on…too much. Trident doesn’t clock in at that high a page count, and certainly not enough to justify how many books feel crammed into its pages. Which is a real shame because, surprise again, I actually really like almost every single element of the book. The romance is refreshing, the pantheon of political gods is mysterious, the list of tasks Coralys finds herself cursed with is intriguing, etc. But even though I was bought into every single thread of the tapestry of this story, by the end of the book, I didn’t feel like we had had enough time or depth to develop any of them sufficiently. Wilson is absolutely brimming with impressive ideas, but their organization needs work to better hammer them into a cohesive narrative. I wouldn’t even cut anything; I would add and rearrange.
The result is a fascinating book that I suspect many are going to love and a few are going to struggle to put a finger on why they don’t like it. The Trident And The Pearl is both rewarding and exciting, and it is always a good thing when you reach the end of a debut and wish there was a lot more of it. If you are looking for a salty love story coated in brine, maybe check this one out if anything I have talked about is speaking to you.
Rating: The Trident And The Pearl – 7.0/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
