To Kill a Kingdom

To Kill a Kingdom is a standalone young adult fantasy by Alexandra Christo, published in 2018 by Feiwel & Friends. It is a retelling of the little mermaid in which the mermaid is a siren princess who collects human hearts and the prince is the hunter who has made a career of killing her kind, and it is told from both of their points of view.

Lira is siren royalty and the most dangerous of her kind, with the hearts of seventeen princes to prove it. When she kills one of her own, the Sea Queen punishes her by turning her human and stripping away her song, then sets the terms: bring back Prince Elian's heart by the winter solstice, or stay like this forever. The deadline is the engine of the book, and the price of missing it is the life she had, which makes the solstice a date she cannot miss and cannot plan around.

Elian spends as little time on land as he can and hunts sirens for a living. When he pulls Lira out of the water, neither of them says who they are, and both of them start wanting to, which is the problem the story is built around. Each of them is working towards the other's death while being the only person the other can talk to honestly, and neither of them is in a position to be sentimental about it.

Christo wrote the novel as a complete story rather than the first of a series, and it establishes Lira, Elian, the Sea Queen's court and the human kingdoms along the coast. It is a fantasy romance with a much higher body count than the fairy tale it borrows its shape from.