Winner of the 2021 New York Author Project contest in the YA fiction category.

Seventeen-year-old Marei lives on Alabaster Island, a remote tropical isle inhabited by 21 families. Nobody under the age of 18 has ever left to visit the mainland. The island and its strange customs are all that Marei and her friends know.

For years, Marei dreaded the Binding. On that day, each teen must write his or her choice of life mate. But with her childhood sweetheart having drowned long ago, Marei has no boy in mind, so she leaves her paper blank. This sets off a chain of events that ruptures the bedrock of her life and leads her to question the only home she’s ever had.

She encounters a mermaid, beings thought to have gone extinct. The mermaid tells Marei to leave the island and offers to help. When a handsome teen from the mainland becomes stranded after a supply drop, Marei falls in love. Her secret plan to flee becomes an obsession.

But the mermaid has a hidden agenda of her own. Now, Marei must confront the shocking reality that lies beneath island life. The choices she makes threaten to upend her fate and that of her island community forever…but only if she can escape alive.

If you like Sarah J. Maas, Leigh Bardugo, Cassandra Clare, Dylan Farrow, Melissa Albert, Michelle Madow, Maggie Stiefvater, Shannon Hale, Kiera Cass, Kami Garcia, Carrie Anne Noble, or Adrienne Young, you won't be able to put down the wildly addictive Mermaid Curse Series.