Luce Korchak is a miserable, lonely teenager who lives with her abusive uncle in the small coastal Alaskan town of Pittley. One night, her uncle drunkenly tries to rape her before abandoning her next to a cliff. She falls off the cliff and into the ocean, but instead of dying, she finds herself transformed into a mermaid. She is taken in by a tribe of mermaids, all young girls who were abused during their previous lives as humans. The mermaids, especially their queen Catarina, want to take vengeance on humanity, and Luce learns that she's expected to use her enchanted voice to sink ships and kill everyone on board.
The books in the series:
- Lost Voices (2011)
- Waking Storms (2012)
- The Twice Lost (2013)
Lost Voices contains examples of:
- The Ageless: Mermaids spend their whole lives at whatever age they were when they were transformed. Catarina is one of the oldest at about sixteen, but some are as young as five or six. Girls younger than that are referred to as larvae, and they aren't taken in by the tribe, but left in the ocean until they're eaten by orcas. Luce is horrified by the prospect of leaving infants to die, but Catarina explains that larvae are impossible to protect for very long, especially since they'll never grow old enough to care for themselves, and that they just attract predators.
- The Alcoholic: Luce's uncle, Peter, spends most of his free time in the bar getting drunk. Luce knows to stay out of his way when he comes home because he gets violent when he's drunk.
- Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: The mermaids follow a code of honor called the timahk, the violation of which will get someone expelled from the tribe. The rules state that no mermaid can hurt another, no mermaid who hasn't broken the timahk can be banished from a tribe, any new mermaid will be welcomed into whatever tribe finds her, and any mermaid who sees another mermaid in trouble must do her best to help her, unless interfering is too dangerous (which is why the mermaids don't have to help the larvae). These rules do not extend towards humans - in fact, the timahk also forbids any sort of contact with humans, which means that any human who hears a mermaid must be immediately killed.
- Bad Mood Retreat: Miriam shows Luce a small cave that most of the tribe doesn't know about. Luce goes there to be alone when she's upset about how things are going with the tribe, and also to practice singing.
- Blackmail: In the first book, Luce rescues a boy, Dorian Hurst, from a wreck, in violation of the timahk. In Waking Storms, Dorian realizes that Luce wasn't supposed to rescue him, so he pulls out a picture he drew of her, writes "If I keep putting these drawings in the water, your friends will find out what you did. So you'd better come talk to me. I'm not playing," on it, makes it into a paper boat, and sets it adrift. Dana finds it and shows it to Luce, who promises to kill Dorian, but when she goes to meet him, she can't bring herself to follow through.
- A Birthday, Not a Break: Luce's attempted rape and transformation into a mermaid occur on her fourteenth birthday.
- Broken Angel: If a mermaid's tail is out of the water for more than a few seconds, it will start to transform into a pair of legs. The process is so horrifically painful that most beached mermaids die of shock. In The Twice Lost, Catarina is one of twenty mermaids captured in a net and dragged out of the water. All die of shock except Catarina, who awakens in a hospital and is horrified to find herself trapped in a human body.
- Broken Masquerade: Catarina is always careful to only let her tribe sink a ship every few weeks in order to avoid the attention of humans. However, after Anais takes over, she and her followers recklessly sink every ship they can find, attracting the attention of the government, who start hiding cameras in the area. Luce destroys the camera she finds, but it isn't enough. At the end of Waking Storms, the entire tribe is massacred, with the exception of Anais, who is taken prisoner so Moreland can interrogate her, and a few girls who manage to escape.
- Disappeared Dad: A year ago, on Luce's thirteenth birthday, her dad went out to sea in a fishing boat and never returned.
- Dying as Yourself: After the mermaids sink a yacht, Luce tries to use her song to transform the cook's teenage daughter Tessa, although her background isn't nearly as horrible as most of the mermaids'. But to Luce's surprise, Tessa fights the change. She says, "No. I won't let you. I want to die human." Then she drowns, like everyone else on board except for Anais.
- Eating Lunch Alone: In the school cafeteria, Luce always sits in the same spot, alone with her back to everyone else.
- Electric Torture: In The Twice Lost, Anais is captured by government officials, who attach electrodes to her that will shock her if she sings.
- First Kiss: As a human, Luce was too shy to talk to boys, let alone kiss one. It's only as a mermaid that she has her first kiss with Dorian.
- Foster Kid: When Luce was eight, she was taken from her father, a petty criminal. She spent months in foster care before her father finally picked her up when she was nine. After that, they had to stay out of the state of Texas so her father wouldn't be arrested for kidnapping her.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: In Waking Storms, Dorian is interrogated by the FBI agents Ellison and Smitt about the shipwreck that killed his family. In their efforts to get Dorian to admit that he was rescued by a mermaid, Ellison acts kind, interested, and sympathetic, while Smitt yells at him for lying when he doesn't say what they want. It doesn't work - Dorian can't bring himself to betray Luce.
- Growing Up Sucks: As a human, Luce dreads becoming an adult - in her experience, most of them range from unpleasant to cruel. After she transforms, she's delighted to learn that she'll be fourteen forever.
- Inhumanable Alien Rights: As Moreland tells Anais, legally she doesn't exist, so the law doesn't apply to her. Government agents have no qualms about massacring entire tribes of mermaids. This is what leads Luce to decide that going public with the existence of mermaids is the safest option - if she and her followers can get average humans on their side, the government won't be able to kill mermaids with impunity anymore.
- Kick the Dog: Anais likes to torture larvae to death by holding them out of the water or sometimes even throwing them onto a beach until their tails dry out.
- Making a Splash: While Luce practices singing, trying to train her voice to do something besides kill people, she discovers that when she sings a certain way, she can make waves rise out of the water and move the way she wants. Catarina says she's never seen anyone else with that gift except for Marina, who was Catarina's queen when she lived near Russia. Luce uses her power in battle against both humans and other mermaids, as well as to conjure up currents to carry herself along. Conventional wisdom is that controlling water is a gift that only a few mermaids have, but Luce is convinced that anyone could learn with practice. She's proven right in The Twice Lost when she gives singing lessons to a group of other mermaids, and all but one manage to conjure up at least a small wave.
- Maligned Mixed Marriage: Luce falls in love with Dorian, and meets him on the beach in secret to avoid the other mermaids' anger. Nausicaa tells her that she's seen hundreds of mermaids fall in love with humans, and it almost always ends tragically. In the vast majority of cases, the mermaid tries to go on land to be with the man, hoping she can survive the pain of losing her tail, only to die in agony. Sometimes the man will leave the mermaid for a human woman, which usually results in the mermaid drowning him before dying of grief. Nausicaa has only known two mermaids successfully turn back into humans, and at least one of them later told her it was her greatest regret.
- Missing Mom: Miriam, one of the mermaids in the tribe, used to live with her mother until her mother ran off with a strange man. Miriam waited alone in the empty house until she ran out of food, then attempted suicide by downing the contents of a medicine bottle and lying in the bathtub. As she began the transformation, her body transformed into a liquid puddle, and she flowed down the drain and out into the ocean.
- Moses in the Bulrushes: Nausicaa tells Luce the story of the Unnamed Twins, the first mermaids, who were born to a shepherd's wife 3,000 years ago. They were sickly, and as girls not worth saving, so their father left them on a cliff beside the sea to die. Instead, they were rescued and raised by Proteus, and transformed into mermaids as adolescents.
- Naval Blockade: The Twice Lost has an unusual example. Hundreds of mermaids in the San Francisco Bay, working together with their voices, raise a wall of water hundreds of feet tall that touches the bottom of the Golden Gate Bridge. This forces the government agents to stop shooting at them - if enough of them die, the tsunami will swamp San Francisco. The plan is not only to stop the killing of mermaids, but also to attract media attention and force the government to negotiate with them. As news spreads, other tribes of mermaids also renounce killing and form their own blockades in different harbors.
- Near-Rape Experience: Peter pins Luce to the ground and starts yanking at her jeans, then suddenly stops and says, "Alyssa? Alyssa, I didn't mean it." When he realizes she isn't Alyssa, he runs away and leaves her.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: In The Twice Lost, Andrew goes to Peter's house, planning to kill him for trying to rape Luce. He can't bring himself to go through with it, so he settles for beating Peter up.
- Outside Ride: Nausicaa has traveled the world by donning life vests and hitching them to the outside of ships.
- Pimping the Offspring: Catarina was sold into sex slavery by her parents in exchange for cigarettes and vodka.
- Pining After Protagonist's Parent: Peter used to be in a relationship with Luce's mother Alyssa, until she left him for her father Andrew. She died of a ruptured appendix when Luce was four, and Peter blames Andrew for not getting her to the hospital on time. During the attempted rape, he calls Luce "Alyssa."
- Really Moves Around: During Luce's childhood, she and her father would move every few months to avoid him being arrested for his thefts.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: In Waking Storms, Luce finds her father alive on a small island somewhere north of the Aleutians. She helps him build a raft and tows him to safety.
- Resentful Guardian: Peter greatly resents having to live with Luce, even though he makes no effort to take care of her and mostly leaves her to her own devices when he's not being cruel. He complains, "Leave it to Andrew to keep causing problems even after he's dead."
- Resistant to Magic: Dorian is mostly immune to the mermaids' song. When the tribe sinks his ship, he looks at Luce and sings her song back at her. Her astonishment at his resistance is part of the reason she decides to rescue him.
- Seashell Bra: Mermaids normally go naked, since there aren't any mermen. When Luce goes to meet Dorian, she starts wearing makeshift bras of seaweed or kelp so she won't feel self-conscious in front of him.
- Self-Harm: Jo, a mermaid who was kicked out of her previous tribe for trying to contact her mom, constantly bites her hand, sometimes hard enough to draw blood.
- Sex Slave: Catarina's parents sold her for cigarettes and vodka to people who used her as a sex slave. Because of everything that was done to her, Catarina hates humans more than almost all the other mermaids, and thinks that making peace with such evil creatures would be impossible.
- The Starscream: Anais, a Rich Bitch from Miami who transforms after the mermaids sink her father's yacht, joins the tribe and immediately starts plotting to overthrow Catarina. She wins the other mermaids' loyalty by helping them salvage flashy human trinkets from wrecks, while spreading rumors that Luce is trying to overthrow Catarina, even though Luce is the only mermaid who's completely loyal to her.
- Targeted to Hurt the Hero: In The Twice Lost, Moreland has Anais sing to Andrew Korchak in order to drive him insane, which is the best way to hurt Luce without being able to capture her. However, after Andrew is released, Luce is able to heal the damage to his mind with her own song.
- This Is Reality: In Waking Storms, Dorian wonders how Luce learned English. He thinks that in a movie she would have learned it by secretly watching TV, but he doesn't think that's right.
- Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: On Luce's last ever day of school, a storm occurs that's similar to the one that killed her father. The storm combined with the fact that it's been almost a year since his disappearance upsets Luce so much that she doesn't eat lunch.
- The Unintelligible: Luce's one friend in Pittley is a mentally disabled ten-year-old boy named Gum, who speaks mostly in moans and gibberish.
