Making Myself Little (The Fairies Tell #4)

Brandon Cloud


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[?] · 0 ratings · 248 pages · Published: 17 Aug 2025
What if the mermaid kept his voice—and refused to make himself small? In Making Myself Little, a modern fairy tale set on the wind-chewed edge between palace optics and storm-honest sea, a queer merman chooses a spell that doesn’t “fix” him so much as make him legible to a world that wants him sanded smooth. Ursa, a nonbinary witch who refuses anesthesia, names the bargain “You will not be made straight… You will be made legible to systems that assume straight.”

What follows isn’t rescue; it’s practice. Ness (Aurel below the surface) builds a life on the seam—one lungful of air, one of salt—while a kind, closeted prince learns that care without complicity is a daily craft. The politics are cameras hum like weather, ritual purity calls itself tradition, and performance has a thirty-day burn-through that the body will not ignore. Boundaries become breath, written right into the “NO JARS. NO SHOWS. BREATHE HERE.”

The prose is intimate, precise, and allergic to easy myth. The novel argues with the old bargain—“Fairy tales promised us transformation at no cost. Real life asks for a receipt.” —and offers a new grammar of thresholds over thrones, steadiness over spectacle, love that makes you more yourself, not less. Come for the storm rescue and slow-burn romance; stay for the door that stays open after you leave.
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