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I'm wobbling between giving this two stars and three stars. I liked the story well enough, I suppose, as very, very light fare, but there were things about the book that bothered me. I guess the biggest of what bothered me was that I wasn't sure how I felt about the way it was done. I like the mermaid premise (I like mermaids, period), and I'm a big fan of almost anything that involves mermaids, but I had this uneasy feeling about the entire tone of the book. Certainly, it doesn't take itself seriously and has a lot of really neat plays on words and on well-known idiomatic phrases, and with all the sea creatures able to talk and the more-magic-than-science sense of the world-building, it had that lighthearted, fun 2D animated feel to it, like in Disney's The Little Mermaid. That on its own is fine, but when the erotic romance flavors are woven in, the explicit sex scenes you normally find in many romances today, it somehow felt wrong, like it was a clash of the two most disparate, most polar opposite of all genres — children's fiction and erotic romance. It made me feel really uncomfortable at times, especially considering that there's a child character in the story — it felt like it needed more of a general PG vibe throughout, like in Disney's Splash, instead of this weird mash of G rating and NC-17 rating, like it would have been better without the sex, or if kissing was the farthest the hero and heroine got in the book. Or, if it was going to have sex in it, it should have been a darker, more haunting kind of tale, with no children or talking animals in it. I don't know. I'm sure it's just me. The second biggest bother for me in the book was the formatting in the Kindle edition. I don't know what it was that did it, but at least one word on every page would be broken up into two words, so that you got something like: "Talk about dam aging the planet." ...where it should have been: "Talk about damaging the planet." Sometimes the words breaking up like that was all to comic effect, but it certainly wasn't intentional, and worse, it was distracting. All in all, though, it was cute, and for the most part, a fun read. Just keep the sex away from any Disney-like story, and I'm fine.

2022-11-14 17:15