Lost Voices (The Lost Voices Trilogy)

Fourteen-year-old Luce has had a tough life, but she reaches the depths of despair when she is assaulted and left on the cliffs outside of a grim, gray Alaskan fishing village. She expects to die when she tumbles into the icy waves below, but instead undergoes an astonishing transformation and becomes a mermaid. A tribe of mermaids finds Luce and welcomes her in—all of them, like her, lost girls who surrendered their humanity in the darkest moments of their lives. Luce is thrilled with her new life until she discovers the catch: the mermaids feel an uncontrollable desire to drown seafarers, using their enchanted voices to lure ships into the rocks. Luce possesses an extraordinary singing talent, which makes her important to the tribe—she may even have a shot at becoming their queen. However her struggle to retain her humanity puts her at odds with her new friends. Will Luce be pressured into committing mass murder?

The first book in a trilogy, Lost Voices is a captivating and wildly original tale about finding a voice, the healing power of friendship, and the strength it takes to forgive.

Sarah Porter on Lost Voices

Dear Amazon Readers,

The mermaids of legend sink ships and drown sailors, but no one ever seems to ask why. Is their behavior really nothing more than mindless cruelty? Or do the mermaids suffer from a deeper compulsion? If so, what provokes their dark desires?

Would it even be possible for a mermaid to make a different choice and change her destiny?

Lost Voices is a search for the secret hearts of mermaids. The mermaids of the Lost Voices trilogy are the girls who have lost their humanity through suffering--but whose humanity keeps coming back to haunt them? They can enchant seafarers and drown them, yet they can’t drown their own feelings of loss and rejection. But if revenge can’t heal their heartache, what can?

Many of us struggle to understand who we are and what our own humanity means. Once you learn all the bad things people are capable of, then how can you accept that you’re one of them? Especially when we’re young, I think a lot of us experience something similar to what the mermaids feel: we have a sense of being like everyone else but also fundamentally "other," part of the everyday world but also outside it. Sometimes we don’t know if we want to fit in, or if we’d rather just be as different as possible.

These mermaids think they’re superior to humankind. They want to believe they’ve escaped from both the vulnerability and the brutality that are part of the human condition. But some of them gradually come to understand that there are aspects of their humanity that are worth fighting to preserve--no matter what the price.

Best,
Sarah