This was an entire… ride and experience to read and finish this book. I should’ve just gone and marked it as dnf. I rolled my eyes so hard throughout this novel 😄. I think I can count about 2 things that I liked about this book and that’s that. And even that (the two things I liked) is a bit of a stretch. I think the cover is one thing I liked?

I love dual-povs, really I do. I even love multi-povs even more. What I don’t like is when they’re not labelled. They’re also both first person (in here, along with being unlabelled) so I only figured out whose chapter it was halfway through the first page (based on what they were talking about); or when they said the other’s name and I went “Oh, it’s Lira’s chapter. Also their character voices were the same so that made it harder to differentiate them. 

There’s two tropes that I dislike heavily when it comes to female characters and they are: I’m not like other girls, and girl-on-girl hate. This basically had both of them so no wonder I didn’t like it. You had Lira going “I’m a SIREN, not a STUPID MERMAID, I’m not like them or stupid human girls”. She would remind you of those facts quite often. Like, yes, we get it. you think you’re extremely superior because you’re not like the disgusting mermaids. Even though the mermaids are very much like the sirens?

So there’s no male sirens, only mermen. They hate the mermen – because they’re merpeople and therefore unlike sirens. Here’s where I’m confused, okay. If they sleep with the mermen, won’t that make the children half merpeople? LIKE Lira the main character? The princess? Maybe even the Sea Witch? So why do we have all this hate towards merpeople when sirens are half merpeople?

We’re told that the siren children are born like mammals and not from eggs (because eggs – mermaid) but doesn’t that still mean the mermen give DNA or whatever to the children? Furthermore, the sirens think merpeople are all “savage” – which I just dislike on a base note – but it also doesn’t make sense because you’ll tell them to their face they’re the worst and how ‘savage’ they are. And then they just? expect the mermen to sleep with them? I didn’t understand how those dynamics would work, or the DNA in this world. And like normally, me + DNA = never anywhere to be seen together. But I would’ve liked some more explanations and less (weird) hate. 

The writing was bad and boring. I rolled my eyes with so many sentences and constantly thought “am I supposed… to think that sounds amazing?” Like why would I clap at Lira being all “kill men” in the beginning when the way she says it is… well, cringey? I couldn’t even enjoy her time as a human because she was so annoying about it.

Lira was a boring and annoying main character to follow. As I said before, she had the two tropes that I really dislike. As this is sort of a Little Mermaid retelling, she became a little bit better but because I didn’t like her from the start, I didn’t care about any of it. It felt like she didn’t have much of a personality? Just “oh I’m a Princess and I hate mermaids and I have a don’t care personality”. And then Christo didn’t show that to me the way I wanted her to. She was all “fantasy edgy” and the wrong type. Edge characters can be done in a good way, but not for any character in this book.

I liked Elian a bit more – but like less than 2% probably. I could predict nearly his entire storyline in the book which, of course, didn’t push up my liking of him. If I can predict what’s going to happen in the book/to the character – what’s really the point of reading the whole book. I felt like Elian didn’t really serve much of a purpose and he was a flat character. Now and then he would rise and then, whoops, back to being a pancake character (you know, because pancakes are flat). 

There was another character I vaguely liked but I think she was mostly there for Elian to be like “hoho, look how smart and devious I am” which I didn’t really like either. Actually, I think I could call all the characters in here flat as pancakes. No real personality, no drive. Just “argh, I’m a pirate” lines with nothing to back them up to prove they’re pirates.

I could see the very bare bones of The Little Mermaid – but it didn’t have the heart of the original story at all. It’s always been about what makes humans, humans, and desire and how that shapes a person. In this book that was all tell, don’t show. And as someone who absolutely loves Hans Christian Andersen – I was very disappointed.