Eriana Kwai, a small island nation in the North Pacific, has for thirty years been surrounded by flesh-eating mermaids who kill anyone who goes into the water. Every year, the island sends twenty highly-trained young men out to sea to massacre as many mermaids as possible, but most of them are always killed. Now for the first time the government is sending out female warriors in the hopes that they'll be immune to the mermaids' magical allure. One of them is eighteen-year-old Meela. But Meela has a secret: when she was a child, she was friends with the mermaid girl Lysithea. After Lysi spares Meela in battle, the two start meeting in secret.
The books in the series:
1. Ice Massacre (September 18, 2014)
2. Ice Crypt (July 12, 2016)
3. Ice Kingdom (December 11, 2017)
3.5. "Ice Storm" (May 21, 2019; prequel short story)
Mermaids of Eriana Kwai contains examples of:
- Abandoned Area: Two totem poles and a nearby cultural centre used to be the main port of entry for tourists, but for the last thirty years, the area has been roped off because it's too close to the water. When Meela, Annith, Tanuu, and Blacktail go there in Ice Crypt, they find a parking lot that's little more than gravel, an overgrown lawn, and a crumbling building with a hole in one of the windows.
- Antagonistic Offspring: Adaro turns out to be Medusa's son. He first tried to overthrow her when he was fifteen by arranging for her to be assassinated, and in the meantime faking her death so he could take the throne. When Medusa discovered his plot, she had him thrown into prison, but a year later, he convinced her that he was remorseful, and she released him. A few years later, he and his followers crossed the Northwest Passage into the Pacific, where Adaro founded his own empire and began to work towards world domination.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: For thousands of years, Eriana's spirit has been bound to the giant two-headed serpent Sisiutl. She wants to ascend to the stars, but the only way she can do that is for Sisiutl to be killed, and nothing can kill Sisiutl. In Ice Kingdom, Meela has Sisiutl's two heads attack and kill each other, freeing Eriana.
- Assassination Attempt: In Ice Crypt, Lysi and her fellow resistance members try to assassinate Adaro twice, first by setting off a mine, then by swarming him with sharks and stabbing him with iron weapons. Both attempts fail when Adaro turns out to be the only merperson who's immune to iron.
- Call Reception Area: No one on Eriana Kwai is allowed near the ocean except in large groups because mermaids have been known to snatch people from the beach. When she was nine, Meela went to play on the beach by herself, which is how she met Lysi.
- Childhood Friend Romance: Meela and Lysi were friends between the ages of nine and ten. During their last meeting, Meela's papa shot Lysi. Meela went to the beach to meet her one last time, only to be greeted by Lysi's cousin, who tried to drag her into the ocean. Both girls spent the next eighteen years thinking the other had lured them to the beach to be killed.
- Closet Key: At first Meela doesn't understand why she isn't attracted to Tanuu and thinks her attraction to Lysi is because of mermaid hypnotism. It isn't until the end of the first book that she realises she's in love with Lysi.
- Cold Iron: Iron leaves mermaids with horrible burns that never heal. Humans fight them by firing iron bolts. Lysi has a gash on her side with a hole at the bottom from when Meela's father shot her eight years ago.
- Dying Town: Eriana Kwai's economy used to be based on fish. Now that fishing is no longer safe, almost every business on the island has closed except for the grocery store, where the shelves are often bare. Islanders survive by hunting, although game has been so overhunted that there's not much left, and by accepting aid from Canada and America.
- Emergency Transformation: At the end of Ice Crypt, Meela has sacrificed her blood to awaken Eriana's Host. She will now slowly bleed to death through the cut in her hand as long as she stays in human form. Lysi kisses her, turning her into a mermaid and saving her life.
- The Empire: The tyrannical merman king Adaro wants to take over the entire ocean. His underwater army of mermen fight to conquer other undersea countries, while his surface army of mermaids attack human ships. His ultimate goal is to depose Queen Medusa of the Atlantic. Lysi has been drafted into his army, even though she despises everything he stands for.
- Fascists' Bed Time: In Ice Kingdom, Adaro institutes a curfew to make his citizens easier to round up for the labour camp where prisoners dig into the earth's crust in an attempt to trigger a tsunami.
- Founder of the Kingdom: Eriana, the legendary founder of Eriana Kwai, was a Deity of Human Origin who was born in what is now Alaska. She was a Friend to All Living Things who had a special gift for getting animals to do what she wanted. During a period of hunger, she summoned a herd of caribou so her people could slaughter and eat them. The Gaela, the goddess who gave Eriana her power, was so furious at her for abusing it that she sent the Aanil Uusha, the incarnation of death, to kill her entire tribe. He spared Eriana's life for reasons that are no longer remembered. Eriana traveled from her homeland to the island that now bears her name. Eriana spent the rest of her life protecting the animals of the island, and after her death, the Gaela turned her into a goddess so she could continue to protect the island.
- Friendship Trinket: When Meela and Lysi were kids, Lysi made matching shell necklaces for the two of them to wear. Unfortunately, Meela's father found out about the necklace, shot Lysi the next time she tried to visit Meela, and grounded Meela for the rest of the school year.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Adaro is the product of a fling between Queen Medusa and a human man who stopped seeing her after he found out she was pregnant. His heritage makes him immune to iron, but it also causes him to transform into a human during king tides, forcing him to hide out on land until he transforms back. When he was an adolescent he searched unsuccessfully for his father. In the process he was captured and tortured by fishermen, resulting in a lifelong hatred of humans. He decided to start his own kingdom because he felt that Medusa's policies were too friendly to humans. Meela eventually finds and kills him while he's in his vulnerable human form.
- Heaven Above: Mermaids believe that the northern lights are the pathway the spirits travel through as they travel to a better place. According to Eriana legend, it's the spirits dancing.
- Hulking Out: When mermaids are angry, their eyes turn red, their teeth turn razor sharp, their skin turns to the colour of seaweed, and their ears grow pointy and long. The trope doesn't apply to mermen, who spend all their time in that form.
- I Want Grandkids: After Meela gets back from the Massacre, her mom, who married at eighteen, starts pressuring her to marry Tanuu and have kids.
- Kick the Dog: In Ice Crypt, Dani, who has been made a trainer for warriors, learns that her students have been feeding a stray dog. She shoots the dog to teach her students not to be soft.
- Lighting Bug: Queen Medusa lights areas of her castle with bioluminescent jellyfish.
- Literal Maneater: Mermaids appear to male sailors in the form of a beautiful woman with the tail of a fish. They use their magical allure to lure in their victims. When a man gets close enough, the mermaids turn into their demon forms, kill him, and eat him.
- Living Lie Detector: Merfolk's enhanced senses allow them to detect lies by feeling the changes in a person's pulse through the water.
- Make a Wish: Before she leaves for the Massacre, Meela wishes on a four-leaf clover that Eriana Kwai could be free from the mermaids.
- The Mutiny: In Ice Massacre, the training master makes Mannoh the captain of the warriors' ship, the Bloodhound. If anything happens to Mannoh, the order of succession is supposed to be Shaena, Linoya, Meela, then Dani. After Mannoh is killed and Linoya is injured too badly to do anything other than lie in bed, Shaena immediately abdicates to her best friend Dani. Meela argues that she is the legitimate captain, but a growing number of girls support Dani because she's the best fighter, despite her cruel and unpredictable personality and Sanity Slippage. Eventually Dani manages to turn almost the whole ship against Meela. Both girls accuse each other of mutiny.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Ice Crypt, Meela searches for the Host of Eriana, a leviathan that has been sleeping under the island for thousands of years, so she can use it to defeat Adaro and end the war. Instead, Adaro ends up in control of the Host.
- Nobody Here but Us Birds: In Ice Crypt, Meela and Annith break into the training base to steal ammunition while Tanuu stands guard. Meela tells Tanuu to make an owl call if he sees anything. Tanuu thinks she might mistake him for a real owl, so he makes up his own cry that Meela thinks sounds like a velociraptor.
- No Eye in Magic: Attempted one year. Nineteen of the warriors were blinded to make them immune to the mermaids' allure. Only one of them kept his sight so he could navigate. It didn't work - the mermaids' voices and smell had the same effect. All the warriors were killed.
- Pit Trap: In Ice Crypt, Meela, Tanuu, Blacktail, and Annith are searching for Eriana's Host when Annith suddenly falls into a flooded pit trap that someone dug to trap a deer or a bear. Tanuu and Blacktail take her back to town to get dried off, but Meela stays and looks into the pit, where she finds a stone with a serpent's head carved into it.
- Put Off Their Food: In Ice Massacre, Dani catches a mermaid toddler in a fishing net. Meela tells her to throw it back in, but Dani slits its throat with an iron dagger. Dinner is a few minutes later, but Meela is too queasy to eat anything.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: As punishment for saving Meela, Lysi is reassigned in Ice Crypt to fight underwater in the south. Normally mermaids fight humans on the surface and mermen fight other mermen underwater, so sending a mermaid to fight mermen is supposed to be a death sentence.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Meela's older brother Nilus supposedly died in the Massacre when she was eight. In fact, he fell in love with the mermaid Ephyra, who transformed him into a merman so he could be with her. When Lysi meets him in Ice Crypt, he goes by Coho.
- La Résistance: In Ice Crypt, Lysi falls in with a group of mermen who are plotting to assassinate Adaro.
- Seashell Bra: Most merfolk go naked, but some of Queen Medusa's citizens wear clothes, including both human-style bikini tops and live sea creatures.
- Sonic Stunner: In Ice Kingdom, after Adaro violates his treaty with the U.S. government by attacking the Aleutian Islands, the army fights back by blasting extremely loud noises into the water to hurt the merfolk.
- Switching P.O.V.: Ice Massacre is all from Meela's perspective, but she and Lysi take turns narrating Ice Crypt. Ice Kingdom adds another narrator, the Navy SEAL Ben Reeves.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: In Ice Massacre, Dani secretly feeds Linoya a powerful sedative to ensure that she won't be able to take Dani's place as captain.
- Underwater City: Lysi grew up in Adaro's capital city, Utopia, which is near the Aleutian Islands. In Ice Kingdom, Lysi and Meela both travel to Medusa's capital city, which is full of kelp archways and stone buildings covered in plant life that reach higher than the surface. Lysi is amazed by how much more vibrant and colourful it is than Utopia.
- The Unmasqued World: The whole world knows about merfolk, even if most humans outside of Eriana Kwai rarely interact with them.
