When the Tides Held the Moon by Venessa Vida Kelley
Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, New Adult, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Gay Boricua MC with asthma, M/M, secondary Desi character with dwarfism
PoV: 1st-person, past-tense
Published on: 29th April 2025
ISBN: 1645661571
Goodreads

In Coney Island, true love rises to the surface. With lush illustrations and buoyant prose, Venessa Vida Kelley forges an unforgettable New York fairytale.

Benigno “Benny” Caldera knows an orphaned Boricua blacksmith in 1910s New York City can’t call himself an artist. But the ironwork tank he creates for famed Coney Island playground, Luna Park, astounds the eccentric sideshow proprietor who commissioned it. He invites Benny to join the show’s eclectic cast and share in their shocking secret: the tank will cage their newest exhibit, a live merman stolen from the salty banks of the East River.

More than a mythic marvel, Benny soon comes to know the merman Río as a kindred spirit, wise and more compassionate than any human he’s ever met. Despite their different worlds, what begins as a friendship of necessity deepens to love, leading Benny’s heart into uncharted waters where he can no longer ignore the agonizing truth of Río’s captivity—and his own.

Releasing Río could mean losing his found family, his new home, and his soulmate forever. Yet Benny’s courageous choice may just reveal a love strong enough to free them both.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~blacksmithing is a superpower
~don’t mess with the Currents
~the MOST STUNNING illustrations
~history isn’t sweet
~but true love is

When the Tides Held the Moon is the wish-fulfilment fantasy white readers have had many times before, retold to centre the BIPOC immigrant experience. So while, sure, it’s a little predictable – beat-for-beat, we’ve read this story before – I think it’s still doing something important.

(Besides, white readers aren’t the only ones who deserve indulgent wish-fulfilment!)

Kelley has clearly done a lot of research into the time period – the book is set in 1911 – and specifically into the parts that don’t make it into conventional history books. The slang made me laugh; the tenement tragedies and workhouse abuses, not so much.

“Well butter my ass and call me toast,” he snorted. “I seen a ton o’ shit in sideshow work, but this takes more than the cake. This takes the whole goldang bakery!”

Quite a lot of the book is like that, a careful balancing act between the depressing racism and xenophobia Benny has to deal with, as a Boricua (Puerto Rican) immigrant, and the found-family and romance. I think When the Moon skews to the softer side – this is a romance! – but Kelley makes sure to never let us forget how rough reality is for these characters, how genuinely bad this part of history was for minority groups and the poor. It’s delicately done.

On the other hand, the clear ‘a happy ending is coming’ vibes woven throughout kept a lot of the awfulness from having much bite. That was probably inevitable, with the kind of romance Kelley was going for. I don’t know if other readers will mind.

I really do not love captor/captive romances, and I wish When the Moon had really examined the fact that, sorry, that is what Benny is, in this scenario. That’s not never mentioned, but it is kind of downplayed; instead, the motif we get is that Benny, too, is caged. By the racism and homophobia of the society he’s in.

Yeeeeeees, I see what you’re saying. I do. But Río is in a literal cage. With people torturing him, and zero privacy. And the cage (or being separated from the ocean) is killing him – again, literally. I can’t help thinking that’s a lot worse. I was pretty angry with Benny for a while; for a surprisingly long time, he’s not even trying to come up with a plan to get Río out. He loses himself in a fantasy, seems to be telling himself things aren’t as bad as they look, that he and Río can somehow continue this indefinitely – ‘this’ meaning exchanging memories, swimming lessons, writing songs together. It’s all genuinely lovely – more on that in a minute – but I’m left wondering how long it would have taken Benny to start doing something if Río hadn’t grown visibly ill.

“I don’t have a choice,” I tried to explain. “In this town, choices are for white men with money, and the rest of us do what we can to get by. When the options are getting sick or shot or thrown in jail, what choices do any of us really have?”

“Do not speak to me of choices when you have not been locked in an iron box,” he said icily. “You have choices, but you are too frightened to make them!”

Actually, it’s really worse than that, because Benny never does actually notice that Río is ill. Río has to tell him. And I’m not inherently opposed to this! I think it’s very believable that Benny would put blinders on and try to pretend everything’s fine, when he’s so happy–

falling in love with Río had changed everything for me, and I’d assumed it had changed everything for him too. At some point, I’d convinced myself he wouldn’t be in such a hurry to leave if he felt like I did. If he knew that staying in the Menagerie meant we could stay together.

Maybe he knew no such thing.

–but I wish we’d had more than this brief moment in a single scene to really delve into that. I would have preferred it become an actual conflict between Benny and Río, that we dig into how selfish love can be (and how blind it can make us to our selfishness), that we wrestle with the fact that being oppressed doesn’t mean you can’t oppress other people. (The Irish immigrants of this period were treated horrifically badly by white Americans, and it didn’t stop them from being racist af to immigrant communities of colour.) I’d have liked more of a realisation that what Benny is doing/has done is deeply wrong, actually. And we didn’t get that, certainly not in any proportionate way.

“I’m choosing us. I’m just trying to be smart about this,,” I said. “If we play our cards right, you won’t have to–“

“By the time you finish being smart, I will be dead.”

It’s a little strange to me that we get a brief mention of Filipino people being kept in cages for ‘freakshows’ like the one Benny ends up working at, but the comparison to Río’s situation isn’t drawn more explicitly. The words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ don’t appear anywhere in my review copy, either, which seems like a glaring omission in the historical context. Río is sapient, a person, not an animal – and he’s not ‘just’ been kidnapped and imprisoned, he also has to obey orders under threat of torture. That’s slavery. With the history of Black slavery baked into every aspect of the US, it stretches belief that no one ever brings that up. Especially since it would have been a good argument to raise when Benny is trying to convince potential allies to help him free Río.

But! Despite what you might think (quite fairly, given how much critique I’ve written) I did like When the Tides Held the Moon, and I don’t think it’s a bad book. I think it suffered from its insistence on being soft and feel-good and fairytale-perfect, but I think it is exactly what Kelley set out to write, and that takes skill that deserves acknowledgement.

And for all the power imbalance, the romance really is wonderful. This is where Kelley indisputably shines; the scenes Benny and Río have together are consistently stunning, rich with emotion conveyed through gorgeous prose. Benny’s internal thoughts are often breathlessly poetic; Río constantly says things that could so easily fall flat and cringey, but coming from him feel natural and genuine (and impossibly romantic).

Santa Maria, ayúdame, I prayed. I think I am the fish, and he is the net.

I don’t know if I was as invested in the romance as I was in getting Río out of there, but the love story is, objectively, beautifully written. A little wish-fulfilment-y? A bit too fairytale-perfect? Maybe – your mileage will vary; I suspect it will depend on each individual reader’s taste in romance. But I also think that most people who’ll be drawn to this book will be very happy with Benny and Río. And whatever else – even taking the power imbalance into consideration! – Kelley manages to absolutely convince you of what Benny and Río feel for each other. That’s really the most important part of a romance, I think; everything else is secondary to that. And so it’s actually pretty easy to let go of my nitpicking, to forgive the plot beats I can see coming from a mile away, because I 100% bought into the love story at the heart of it all.

Learning to love like learning to swim, until each night in the tank with Río felt like being consecrated by forty tons of holy water.

I’m probably the person least qualified to comment on Benny’s identity and authenticity and whatnot, but I did want to address Kelley’s use of Puerto Rican Spanish throughout. Because up until now, I have not had a good time with books that mixed the character’s native language into their internal monologue. Some of this is definitely me: I have Dumb Brain Stuff about foreign-to-me languages, they make me panic, etc. But I did not have a problem with When the Tides Held the Moon. And not because the Spanish is hardly there; there’s plenty of it, at least by my monolingual standard. But for ONCE, I actually could mostly figure out what was said or meant from context! And anything I couldn’t – there’s a glossary at the back of the book. Which there usually isn’t. And I understand the arguments against having glossaries for real languages like Spanish; I’m not arguing against them. But I am saying that I really, really appreciated how clear Benny’s meaning always was to me, and I also appreciate the glossary (even if I didn’t use it while reading; I didn’t know it was there until I finished the book). So if, fellow English-only readers, you are hesitant about picking up a book where you will be running into a fair bit of a language you don’t speak – this is the best example of that I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think you need to be nervous at all.

The sight of him ripped up everything I thought I understood about creation. One look at him and you had to wonder if the guys who wrote the Bible had been selling God short the whole time.

Another thing I want to give Kelley so many points for is their mermaids! Not just the visual design – although that is fantastic, and gorgeous, as you can see on the cover (Kelley was their own cover artist!) and in the illustrations throughout the book. But the worldbuilding of the mer, too. There’s not chapters and chapters of it, but the lore is more extensive than I was expecting, and a lot more interesting. There’s the belief in the Currents, which is somewhere between a religion and a philosophy; there’s the various magical abilities the mer have, some of which I’ve never seen before (and massively approve of!); we get insight into how mer arrange their families and social groups, their views on gender, and how completely they separate sex from romance. It’s all fascinating, and I was delighted with how much thought clearly went into every aspect of it, from mer colouration to their magic.

The ending bothered me a little – not the cinematic drama of it all, that was very in keeping with the book’s vibe, but the final-moment reveal. The groundwork was laid for it, I’d predicted it (and I’m sure most others will too), but the reveal itself ended up being confusing, kind of ambiguous. It comes down to a single sentence that contradicts what I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to have thought was happening? I thought the sentence might have been cut from the final copy (I read an arc, after all) but I checked, and no, it’s still there. Which means I’m no longer sure what the big reveal was.

MAJOR spoiler under the cut: View Spoiler »The line is ‘Anyone might look at my body and think nothing has changed’ – so Benny DIDN’T turn into a merman? Wasn’t a merman originally, before the hurricane? I’m so confused. « Hide Spoiler

Ultimately, I was not swept away by these tides, even though I badly wanted to be. But it’s a lovely book nonetheless, and honestly, the illustrations alone are worth the price of admission – I cannot exaggerate how ridiculously stunning they are; the art for this book exceeds every hope I had! I think readers with more of a taste for fairytale-type romances will enjoy this much more than I did, but I did enjoy it, and I’m glad I read it.

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