Alexandra Christo

To Kill a Kingdom takes the Little Mermaid and turns it inside out. Lira is a siren who takes the heart of a prince on every birthday until her mother punishes her by making her human, and the prince who hunts her kind is the one who finds her. Christo is British and wrote it as a debut. The appeal is the voice: two first-person narrators who are both genuinely unpleasant, and neither of whom softens on schedule. Into the Crooked Place moved into a crime-and-magic setting with four narrators. The book found a second readership through online recommendation years after it came out.