The Trident and the Pearl

By: Sarah K. L. Wilson

Narrated by: Ell Potter

A desperate queen makes a deal with the gods to save her land in this spellbinding romantasy debut from Sarah K. L. Wilson.

"Perfect for readers who love slow-burn romance steeped in lush fantasy!" ―Danielle L. Jensen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Fate Inked in Blood

Queen Coralys rules the Kingdom of the Five Isles, but when disaster strikes, killing her husband and destroying half her nation, she pleads with the gods for salvation. And they do save her, turning back the terrible winds and tide and snatching her islands from the brink of destruction.

But the gods have a wicked sense of justice and they demand an exchange for their help: Coralys must marry the first man to set foot on her pier. Coralys expects the fleet of a neighboring country to come to rescue her people, led by its prince, a loyal ally. What she gets instead is a fisherman so sunburnt and stinking that her court can barely keep their breakfast down.

Coralys marries the fisherman just as she promised the gods, and sets out with him in his unkempt dinghy, with nothing but hopes of revenge against the gods to keep her from despair. But what she does not know is that the fisherman is actually the god of the sea. And he stepped on her dock for a reason.

His own kingdom besieged, his body terribly wounded, and his place as a god threatened, the fisherman has plans to turn the tides set against him and finally offer a place of refuge for his people. But working the magic he needs will require the help of the one woman bent on his destruction.

"Intricately wrought and deeply imaginative ... the kind of delicious slow-burn fantasy that made me love reading." ―Hannah Whitten, author of The Foxglove King

Critic reviews

"Breathtaking prose and a world that feels both timeless and new—The Trident and the Pearl is perfect for readers who love slow-burn romance steeped in lush fantasy!"—Danielle L. Jensen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Fate Inked in Blood

"Intricately wrought and deeply imaginative, The Trident and the Pearl is the kind of delicious slow-burn fantasy that made me love reading. If you fondly remember picking up your first Robin McKinley in the local library, this one is for you."—Hannah Whitten, author of The Foxglove King

Enemies to lovers with a twist. Totally wrecked me

“Well done, wife of mine,” he murmurs, but he can stuff his “well dones” down his own throat and gag on them. Or I can do that for him if he finds it too difficult.

Dark. Gritty. Beyond morally gray and I'm here for it! Love the narration. The emotional tone is absolutely gripping.

Your morally dark gray Romantasy Colonel Brandon!

An immortal god of the sea falls first. Hard. His yearning is this overwhelming devotion that seeps into every page, protective, vulnerable, ocean-vast love that makes your chest ache. Devotion pours off him in every fierce, quiet moment. It flows through each chapter and, of all the other insane feelings this book will make you feel, that love is never overshadowed or usurped. If you, like Marianne Dashwood, don’t believe in second attachments, here’s your Colonel Brandon.

I wanted to like it more than I did

This book sounded wonderful in theory, with lots of things I normally enjoy... fantasy, romance, enemies to lovers (kinda), arranged marriage/forced proximity, gods, set near the sea.... I really thought it had everything to become a fast favorite. Unfortunately, it fell flat for me.

***MILD SPOILERS AHEAD***

I found the main character very unlikeable. She was very self-righteous and melodramatic. I had to roll my eyes when she thinks of other characters as self-righteous, especially when they are gods with millennia of experience on her. I get that it's interesting to have a flawed MC and see them grow, but I didn't see growth from her in this book, she is confronted with her mistakes and goes full into woe-is-me mode, then goes and makes more irrational, impulsive decisions. I believe she's supposed to be in her late 20s, but she acts like she knows everything in the world and has nothing to learn from anybody, feeling more like a teenager than an almost-30yo. I suppose that can be attributed somewhat to her growing up as a princess and then a queen, but it chafed. The narrator's performance also sounded very full of herself... at times, I'd wonder if I didn't like the character because the narrator made her sound so full of herself, or if the narrator was just doing a wonderful job performing the character as obnoxiously as she was written.

Unfortunately, the MMC did not save this. For a romance, there were absolutely zero moments that made me swoon, nothing that made me interested in him as a love interest. We saw very little of his personality, and what we saw was bland. The book is in first person, so you should be able to feel the romantic/sexual tension, but unfortunately the author would resort to "telling instead of showing", telling us things like "we worked the rest of the day together and our movements fit together like we had been working together for years and we got along and made jokes" instead of letting us live those moments with the characters so we could fall in love with them in their charming moments. Or the MMC's best friends tells the FMC about how cool and awesome and badass the MMC is, that we're "meeting him at a low point", and I suppose we're just supposed to take his word for it, because we never see him really do anything. I can't help but compare him to other MMCs that we "meet at a low point", and they are dark and brooding and self-isolating but in a way that draws the reader in and makes you want to know more. It feels like there was very little actual dialogue between them and whenever the FMC would describe the MMC looking at her with desire or whatever, it just felt unwarranted and out of left field. Probably the worst for me was the GIANT miscommunication trope that is necessary for the whole central conflict to unfold. I just wanted to grab these two characters and shake them. Somehow, I ended up liking the two antagonists more than the two main characters. They at least had personality.