If the claustrophobic island rules, fire-and-brimstone sermons, and the way the sea is used to police girls’ behavior in The Seawomen gripped you, you’ll be riveted by Gather the Daughters. On a remote island, daughters like Vanessa and Caitlin are raised under a fanatical doctrine and ritual “summers” that let them glimpse forbidden freedom—until a girl’s desperate act sparks a quiet rebellion. It channels the same dread-laced, close-community pressure and the ache of wanting out that you felt as the island elders punished any woman who challenged the order.

You responded to the pious fearmongering and public punishments that kept the island’s women in line in The Seawomen. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred endures Gilead’s ritualized prayers, arranged “Ceremonies,” and scripture-as-law that dictate her every move. The way leaders recast catastrophe as divine judgment will echo the island’s sermons that blame women for imagined monsters in the waves—only here, the weapons are verses, uniforms, and surveillance. The result is the same chilling moral grip, dramatized through one woman’s determined, intimate resistance.

If the sea’s ominous pull and the close, character-focused perspective in The Seawomen stayed with you—those secret shoreline moments and the dread of what the water might take back—Our Wives Under the Sea sharpens that feeling to a knife’s edge. When Leah returns from a disastrous deep-sea mission changed, her wife Miri narrates the slow, intimate unraveling at home while flashbacks recount the submerged terror. It’s the same hush of salt and fear, an eerie oceanic presence pressing in on a relationship with tender, haunting focus.

If you were drawn to the way elders in The Seawomen mythologize the sea to terrify girls into obedience, The Water Cure is a chilling echo. Sisters Grace, Lia, and Sky live under their parents’ regime of “cures” meant to protect them from men’s supposed toxicity, with rituals and superstitions saturating every breath by the shore. When outsiders arrive, the girls’ beliefs warp and crack. The story’s dreamlike menace and ambiguous, ritualized dangers mirror the island folklore and taboo-breaking tension you loved.

If the coming-of-age defiance in The Seawomen—sneaking beyond sanctioned spaces, questioning the elders’ stories about what the sea will do to you—was your hook, The Grace Year hits the same nerve. Sixteen-year-old Tierney is exiled with other girls to survive a brutal “grace year” meant to purge their alleged magic before returning to a rigid society. Between poachers, paranoia, and a budding will to resist, her hard-won awakening mirrors that fierce shift from fear to agency that made the island revolt so cathartic.