Blood calls to blood; charm calls to charm.

It is the way of the world.

Come close and tell us your dreams..Sanna has been living as a mermaid -- but she is only half seavish. The night of her birth, a witch cast a spell that made Sanna's people, including her landish mother, forget how and where she was born. 

Now Sanna is sixteen and an outsider in the seavish flok, where women rule and mothers mean everything. She is determined to go to land and learn who she is. So she apprentices herself to the ancient witch, Sjældent, to learn the magic of making and unmaking. With a new pair of legs and a mysterious quest to complete for her teacher, she follows a clue that leads her ashore on the Thirty-Seven Dark Islands. 

Her fellow mermaids wait floating on the seaskin as Sanna stumbles into a wall of white roses thirsty for blood, a hardscrabble people hungry for miracles, and a baroness of fading beauty who will do anything to live forever, even at the expense of her own children.