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faithnomoar 's review for:
When the Tides Held the Moon
by Venessa Vida Kelley
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Oh, this book. This beautiful, beautiful book.
It's essential to note that I'm no stranger to Venessa Vida Kelley's work—she's an artist of a particular kind, who can put every emotion on the page in a single image. Love, joy, despair, longing. The pictures she produces are vivid and pull you into another world. And how fortunate we as readers are to have, now, her writing, that does the just the same in captivating detail with enormous care.
When the Tides Held the Moon focuses on our protagonist and narrator, Benigno “Benny” Caldera; an orphaned boy from Puerto Rico in the early 1900s who found his way to New York after losing all the family he has back home, searching for something...more. He finds it in a sideshow in Coney Island, where, after a spiral of events, he ends up mixed in with the group and their plans to capture a real, live merperson. The merman they capture becomes part of Benny's "something more", too; Rio, as Benny calls him, is homesick from the sea and caged from the life he should be living as a sideshow attraction at Luna Park, not dissimilar to the way Benny is caged as a closeted man of color in a time where the world seems to pigeonhole him. As the two fall in love, and the stakes become higher, Benny has to grapple with loving Rio—and therefore wanting him free—and knowing that means he'll never see the merman again.
I have no shortage of praise for this book—so many pieces of it feel as if it was written for me. For one, the lush setting of Coney Island and the surrounding city was brought to life with such impeccable detail, and, along with the early 1900s setting, such research. I'm a massive nerd for historical accuracy—tiny details about the way people speak in a certain time, or restaurants that might have existed on a street, or events that coincided with the events of a story. And I could see that care and detail for the time and place of Kelley's story poured onto every page.
So many people love to believe that stories that are "historically accurate" might preclude diverse groups of characters—race, sexual orientation—but the way Kelley immediately dispells that narrative with a crop of impeccable characters who feel lived in, loved, and real is a rare gift. I am incredibly fond of a found family dynamic, and the cast of characters at Luna Park were that and more—they were messy, and honest. They had journeys of their own that I would read books about each and every one of them. Each character had their own, smaller arc; pieces of the puzzle that made this lush group of oddities into a family. Standouts for me were Matthias, the "strong man" of the group whose greatest strength seemed to be his kindness and intellect, Lulu—the menagerie's "largest woman", whose position as a caretaker often masked her own struggles, and Eli and Emmett, the so-called conjoined twins with more in common with Benny than he knows despite their early clashing.
But this book, truly, is about Benny and Rio. The way Kelley works in her own experiences as a queer Puetro Rican woman into Benny, and parallels his struggles with Rio's displacement from the ocean was masterful. The pacing of the relationship had me aching, watching the two of them messily realize their similarities—and differences—and how they'd slowly but surely found home in one another. Kelley did incredible work also crafting original lore for her merpeople, and by the end of the book, I still had questions—and yet found myself alright not having them answered because of the wistful feeling the story left in my chest.
Somewhere around halfway through the book, one of my favorite feelings reading books like this hit me—the awareness that, while this is a romance book, and, by definition, I know the characters should get a happy ending, but I still don't entirely know how that's going to happen. And what a journey it was getting to piece that together, bit by bit. I'm already eager to reread the book knowing the way it all comes together in the end, which is for me the sign of a lasting favorite read. I'm particularly eager also to see the final illustrations in the book—as a longtime fan of Kelley's beautiful art style, and having seen what the eARC calls "unfinished sketches" (which on their own are captivating), I know they'll be as stunning as the text they accompany.
I am so incredibly grateful to have gotten to read this book ahead of its release, and cannot wait to read more and more from Venessa Kelley after this touching debut. It's going to stick with me for a long time. Thank you Kensington Publishing and NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for my honest review—I am so eager to tell the world how much I loved this one.
It's essential to note that I'm no stranger to Venessa Vida Kelley's work—she's an artist of a particular kind, who can put every emotion on the page in a single image. Love, joy, despair, longing. The pictures she produces are vivid and pull you into another world. And how fortunate we as readers are to have, now, her writing, that does the just the same in captivating detail with enormous care.
When the Tides Held the Moon focuses on our protagonist and narrator, Benigno “Benny” Caldera; an orphaned boy from Puerto Rico in the early 1900s who found his way to New York after losing all the family he has back home, searching for something...more. He finds it in a sideshow in Coney Island, where, after a spiral of events, he ends up mixed in with the group and their plans to capture a real, live merperson. The merman they capture becomes part of Benny's "something more", too; Rio, as Benny calls him, is homesick from the sea and caged from the life he should be living as a sideshow attraction at Luna Park, not dissimilar to the way Benny is caged as a closeted man of color in a time where the world seems to pigeonhole him. As the two fall in love, and the stakes become higher, Benny has to grapple with loving Rio—and therefore wanting him free—and knowing that means he'll never see the merman again.
I have no shortage of praise for this book—so many pieces of it feel as if it was written for me. For one, the lush setting of Coney Island and the surrounding city was brought to life with such impeccable detail, and, along with the early 1900s setting, such research. I'm a massive nerd for historical accuracy—tiny details about the way people speak in a certain time, or restaurants that might have existed on a street, or events that coincided with the events of a story. And I could see that care and detail for the time and place of Kelley's story poured onto every page.
So many people love to believe that stories that are "historically accurate" might preclude diverse groups of characters—race, sexual orientation—but the way Kelley immediately dispells that narrative with a crop of impeccable characters who feel lived in, loved, and real is a rare gift. I am incredibly fond of a found family dynamic, and the cast of characters at Luna Park were that and more—they were messy, and honest. They had journeys of their own that I would read books about each and every one of them. Each character had their own, smaller arc; pieces of the puzzle that made this lush group of oddities into a family. Standouts for me were Matthias, the "strong man" of the group whose greatest strength seemed to be his kindness and intellect, Lulu—the menagerie's "largest woman", whose position as a caretaker often masked her own struggles, and Eli and Emmett, the so-called conjoined twins with more in common with Benny than he knows despite their early clashing.
But this book, truly, is about Benny and Rio. The way Kelley works in her own experiences as a queer Puetro Rican woman into Benny, and parallels his struggles with Rio's displacement from the ocean was masterful. The pacing of the relationship had me aching, watching the two of them messily realize their similarities—and differences—and how they'd slowly but surely found home in one another. Kelley did incredible work also crafting original lore for her merpeople, and by the end of the book, I still had questions—and yet found myself alright not having them answered because of the wistful feeling the story left in my chest.
Somewhere around halfway through the book, one of my favorite feelings reading books like this hit me—the awareness that, while this is a romance book, and, by definition, I know the characters should get a happy ending, but I still don't entirely know how that's going to happen. And what a journey it was getting to piece that together, bit by bit. I'm already eager to reread the book knowing the way it all comes together in the end, which is for me the sign of a lasting favorite read. I'm particularly eager also to see the final illustrations in the book—as a longtime fan of Kelley's beautiful art style, and having seen what the eARC calls "unfinished sketches" (which on their own are captivating), I know they'll be as stunning as the text they accompany.
I am so incredibly grateful to have gotten to read this book ahead of its release, and cannot wait to read more and more from Venessa Kelley after this touching debut. It's going to stick with me for a long time. Thank you Kensington Publishing and NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for my honest review—I am so eager to tell the world how much I loved this one.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Physical abuse
Minor: Fatphobia, Hate crime, Homophobia, Racial slurs, Racism, Xenophobia, Trafficking, Outing