Author: Anna Banks
My rating: 4.5 ohmysweetgoodness, there-are-mermaids! hearts
Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal, Romance
Pub. date: May 22nd 2012
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Synopsis: Galen is the prince of the Syrena, sent to land to find a girl he's heard can communicate with fish. Emma is on vacation at the beach. When she runs into Galen—literally, ouch!—both teens sense a connection. But it will take several encounters, including a deadly one with a shark, for Galen to be convinced of Emma's gifts. Now, if he can only convince Emma that she holds the key to his kingdom...
Told from both Emma and Galen's points of view, here is a fish-out-of-water story that sparkles with intrigue, humor, and waves of romance. (synopsis from Goodreads)
My
thoughts: This book was nothing like I’d expected. I’m not really sure what I’d
expected, but it sure wasn’t this, that’s for certain. It was far better than
I’d expected. The plot, the characters… It was great. To quote Emma,
ohmysweetgoodness.
I love Emma. She’s sarcastic, funny and
realistic. Her reactions to everything she learns are realistic. Her feelings
are realistic. And it’s really fun to follow her thoughts. And she doesn’t
really freak out over what she learns, which impressed me, because it is a lot
to handle. She had a hard time believing it, but she didn’t have a breakdown or
anything like that. She just dealt with it. That takes strength.
I love Galen, too. Since he’s a Syrena, he
grew up in the ocean, in their community, and their community works very
differently, so he doesn’t know a lot of the expressions and stuff that we use
every day. It was pretty funny when Emma would say something typically “human”,
and he be all confused. Things that everyone knows, or at least, you expect
everyone to know them. But what I liked the most about Galen was that, despite
his and Emma’s connection, he’s willing to give her to his brother in order to
save the Syrena. It broke my heart whenever it was mentioned, but I still loved
that he was ready to sacrifice so much for the Syrena.
The plot was original and very interesting,
and better than I’d expected. It was a little slow at times, but it didn’t get
boring, because the characters kept me plenty entertained. One character in particular,
namely Rayna. In the beginning of the book, I didn’t really like her, she came
across as really bitchy, especially to Emma, but then you got to know her a
little better. It didn’t take long before I loved her.
The only real minus about the book was the
writing. It wasn’t that it was bad, it was just that the writing style wasn’t
really my cup of tea. I prefer reading books in past-tense, but this was in the
present. But even that wasn’t the big problem. It was that the author switched
the narrative perspective. When it was from Emma’s perspective, it was
first-person perspective, and when it was from Galen’s perspective, it was in
third person. I get the thought behind it, it makes sense, but it wasn’t really
my taste.
The ending wasn’t really surprising, I’d
expected something like that, but the author really succeeds in making me want
to read the next book like, now, because, ohmysweetgoodness, I need to know
what will happen!
Otherwise, it was an amazing read, and I’ll overlook the narrative
changes, because I loved the plot so much. I’ve had this book on my to-read
list for years, why didn’t I pick it up sooner? I was really missing out. I
won’t be waiting as long to read the next book in the series.
No comments:
Post a Comment