Book 1 in The Wicked Sea Series
Reviewed by CJ | Rating: 2/5 📖🎧
I wanted to love this one. I really did.
Floating pirate ships. A mermaid on the run. A cold, deadly warlock who despises her kind. A lost Atlantis-style kingdom hiding the heart of a death god. Sentient trees. Warlocks with Pegasus wings grafted onto their backs for flight (you heard that correctly). On paper, The Wicked Sea is everything (and I mean everything) you could possibly throw at a fantasy novel. In practice? It was a lot. For me, too much.
So what’s it actually about?
Zephyra of the Syl is a mermaid hiding out on land while trying to outrun a dangerous sorcerer when she ends up captured by Arion Stone — a warlock who is cold, brutal, and has a deep hatred for the Marrow (mermaids). Unknown to his colleagues (can we call the other murderous Warlocks and cult-like overseers colleagues?) Arion has a problem of his own. Because he is the most powerful of his created warlock brethren, the power that was built into him is killing him, and he’s running out of time. His only shot is a mythical artifact — the heart of the god of death — rumoured to be hidden in a fabled, lost kingdom.
Zephyra, being Zephyra, looks him dead in the eye and tells him she absolutely knows where to find it.
She does not know where to find it.
But the agreement is binding so they’re stuck with each other going forward. she needs his help to escape, he needs her (supposed) knowledge to survive — and off they go into complete and total chaos.
What I loved — or tried to
The ambition here is genuinely impressive. Gray throws everything into this world and I do respect the commitment. Floating ships, gods of death, underwater castles, sentient trees, Pegasus-winged warlocks — it’s creative, it’s wild, and there were moments where I could see exactly what this book wanted to be. I like an ambitious story. I really do.
It just needed it to be pulled together a little more. It made me think of the stories my youngest used to tell that were a long string of “…and then, and then, and then…”
The romance
Enemies-to-lovers is a trope I love when it’s done right. There’s a fine line between love and hate, right? The setup here had real potential — two people who genuinely, viscerally despise each other, forced into an uneasy alliance with the highest of stakes. That should work.
It didn’t quite get there for me though. The hatred felt real. And while the bond pulled them together, the progression to anything else didn’t seem natural. It went from mutual loathing to (and I’ll let my own quote stand here) BANG. Literally banging, and the transition felt more like a plot requirement than an organic slow burn. The groundwork just wasn’t there to earn it. She was selfish and he was cold and I couldn’t figure out what the hell attracted them to each other.
The thing I couldn’t get past
Okay. So. Around page 358, Orion is established to be minutes from death. His time is running out. The clock is ticking. The end is near.
Gentle Reader, it was imminent for a very, very long time.
My friend J and I listened to part of this on a road trip, and at some point we started joking that we could have made it into a drinking game — take a drink every time his impending death was mentioned. We would not have made it to the end of the book. It was repeated so many times across so many pages and chapters even while they changed locations and the plot continued unfolding around him, that it stopped feeling urgent at all.
By the time we were supposed to feel the weight of it, we’d been told he was seconds away from dying for what felt like the last quarter of the book. I didn’t count it out, so maybe it was that long? However much of it contained Arion actively dying, by the time we got there I was actively hoping for it so we would stop hearing about it.
The tone problem
This one’s a little hard to explain, but I’ll try. The dialogue and writing style read very YA to me, and that’s not a criticism on its own. But layered on top of that is extremely graphic content of explicit sex scenes and an f-bomb count that I, a person who swears enthusiastically and without apology, found genuinely excessive. None of those things are problems individually. Together, they felt jarring — like the book couldn’t quite decide what it was. The narrators on the audiobook were actually good. This one is really on the writing itself, not them. But hearing it out loud made the tonal whiplash even harder to ignore than it was in print.
Format recommendation
If you’re going to read this, go physical. I read the hardcover first and while my complaints were the same, the experience was a little smoother on the page than when it brought to life for my ears. The audio production is fine — genuinely, the narrators did their job — but the repetition of Arion’s imminent death hits differently when it’s being spoken aloud on a long drive. J and I are still recovering.
Who’s this for?
- Readers who are newer to fantasy and haven’t yet built a long comparison list in their heads
- Young adult readers stepping into adult fantasy for the first time
- Anyone who loves maximalist, throw-everything-at-the-wall worldbuilding and doesn’t mind if it’s pure chaos
- Readers who enjoy high-concept premises and are willing to go along for the ride
Who should probably skip it:
- Anyone who needs their enemies-to-lovers slow burn to actually burn slowly
- Readers sensitive to tonal inconsistency between writing style and explicit content
- Anyone who will be driven up the wall by a death countdown that lasts longer than some of my childhood pets did
- Fans of Gray’s earlier work hoping for something more polished — if Bitten didn’t land for you either, this one probably won’t either
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
🎧 Audiobook
📱 Ebook
📚 More from The Wicked Sea Series
- Book 1 — The Wicked Sea | Reviewed by CJ | ⭐ 2/5 📖🎧
- Book 2 — Coming Soon, maybe?
Ready for more reviews from CJ? Find More Here
Plot Approved. ✅
📖🎧 Physical & Audiobook | Series: The Wicked Sea, Book 1 | Genre: Fantasy Romance