Book 1 in the Waterfire Saga series
AUTHOR: Jennifer Donnelly
PUBLISHED: May 6th, 2014
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Fantasy, Mermaids
PREMISE: Serafina's life is turned upside down when war comes to her world...
MY REVIEW: Okay, so I've read Donnelly's stuff before and quite liked it. So keep that in mind when I ask: what the heck was this? This book felt like it was written by a completely different author and NOT in a good way. It was frankly...childish.
Seriously authors, what is it about mermaid books that makes you think you have to write them in a childish manner? This happens to me over and over again in the mermaid genre. I don't get it! This also stinks, because if it weren't for the childish tone (and some funky world-building issues such as why do the mermaids wear gowns? I would think all that cloth wouldn't hold up well in sea water) I would be eating this book up for breakfast. It's got a heroine who is proactive, female friendship, diversity among mermaids (and also not all of them are skinny!) and romance is kept to a minimum. Also, the packaging on this book is fab. If there were awards for best book design, this would be one of my nominees. But I keep getting side-tracked by the clumsy and childish writing style.
It's just puzzling to me, because I KNOW this author can write better then this. So I'm terribly confused about why she suddenly thinks her readers are idiots and need everything explained to us via info dump after info dump. You're better then this Donnelly. Just because it's a mermaid book doesn't mean you have to treat it like it's childish. So now my feelings about this book are honestly kind of torn. There's some great stuff in it, but I KNOW this author can do much better then this and thus I'm kind of baffled about what happened.
WHO SHOULD READ: Mermaid book fans
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five I expected better of yous
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