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Captivate is the first book in the Submerged Sun series by Vanessa Garden. The Submerged Sun series is a young adult paranormal fantasy featuring an underwater city and mermaids! As soon as I saw that I thought, Umm, yess! Sign me up please! I really enjoyed this one. It does have a love triangle, so I know that might be a turn off for some people (and full disclosure: if love triangles do bug you, this is a pretty big one, so you might want to skip in that case.) but I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to continuing the series.

I don't read a ton of mermaid books, but I do really enjoy them. I liked Captivate because a lot of it took place in the underwater world, and it was a very cool world, called Marin. Vanessa Garden did an excellent job with the world building in this novel. In fact, it was one of my favorite things about the book. Another great thing were the characters. I really enjoyed Miranda, Marko and Robbie. I am not going to talk about which team I am on for the love triangle. Partially because I don't want to spoil anything and partially because I am a little uncertain as to whether I will change teams in the next book or not. This love triangle had a lot of ups and downs and back and forths in it. And I do mean a lot. As far as love triangles go, this was not a bad one. Sometimes I find love triangles annoying if they seem contrived, but this one didn't bother me at all. I genuinely do see the upside to Marko and to Robbie. (I do kind of wish that Miranda would just choose a side and stay on. The part about love triangles that does become annoying as a series goes on is all the flipping back and forth. I just don't think that is fair to anyone and I don't like to see too much of it. But we will have to wait for the next book in the series to see if that is the case.

Captivate is a well written book with a very interesting concept. Vanessa Garden does some cool and new things with mermaids, which I really enjoyed. It was not like all the other mermaid stories out there, and the world she creates is something pretty special. The characters did fall into some of the more cliche YA stereotypes, so be warns about that. But overall, I thought Capitvate was a strong start to what could be a very promising paranormal series. I am interested to see where it goes next.

This review was originally posted on Book Briefs