Calder is a merman, a predator who drags humans to their
deaths so he can feed off their positive emotions to fill the voice inside
every merperson. But this time he and his sisters are not targeting a random
human – they have set their sights on John Hancock, a man promised to them by
his father and a debt that has long been owed
Of course, even though he’s not finally within their reach, getting him to the water is a different matter entirely, especially since he has listened to his family history and is wary of the lake. It falls on Calder to try and find a way to the man, through his daughter Lily if necessary.
But getting into Lily’s affections isn’t easy, especially
as she comes to suspect something is different about Calder and stories of lake
monsters abound. And then there’s the trap of his own emotions, caring for his
prey even though killing John Hancock would not only be revenge, but his chance
at freedom from his sisters.
This novel is primarily about a romance and, I have to
say, it didn’t appeal to me at all because it had several tropes I strongly
dislike. But I will start with on element that was almost done right. Calder
starts by being stalkery in the extreme. He follows Lily around, he tries to
charm her, he appears at her house at truly bewildering hours - before anyone
is awake (except Lily because that girl never sleeps) and generally is a creepy
creepy stalker guy. And Lily is put off because of that – for a while anyway.
She doesn’t even let his rescuing her convince her that she must instantly open
her heart to the stalker. Yet… she does end up with him so the stalking does
pay off, and for the level of stalking her reaction is still a little low.
Someone’s hanging around your garden around dawn and regularly camping in your
hammock? A little creeped out is a pretty minor response.
Firstly, it rushed in too quick and too soon. It seems
that Calder arrives in town, sees Lily and is pretty soon smitten. It’s not
love at first sight, but it’s close. And when you think Lily is the daughter of
his big bad enemy John Hancock and a tool to getting at him, I don’t really see
him being all open and looking for love. Yes, I know it’s a trope in romance
and YA, but it still loses me to see people declaring eternal-love-I’ll-totally-betray-my-family-for-you
after a brief acquaintance.
But secondly, and mostly, it’s how Lily reacts to him.
Not just the reluctance-turns-to-love trope, but how, when she discovers he’s a
merman and he finally admits it they have conversations that go a little like
this:
Calder: I’m a merman, a dangerous predator
Lily: yay, merman! Let me quote pretentious poetry!
Calder: Actually, we kill people, I’m a murderer.
Lily: But you don’t mean it and we can be happy together.
Let me make you happy.
Calder: We. Are. Predators. WE KILL PEOPLE! They are DEAD
Lily: Under the sea, under the sea, darling it’s better
down where it’s wetter, take it from me!
What is this, Bella Swan the Rather More Soggy? It’s not
just the whole falling in love with a mass murderering monster because he’s so
hot and romantic which is such an utter depressing trope in Paranormal romance.
No, she doesn’t even pause, it’s like he confessed to a minorly annoying
personal habit like jangling his keys or ruining perfectly good pizza with
pineapple (don’t argue, that’s just nasty) rather than drowning multiple people
so he can suck on their happiness (this? Sounds waaay dirtier than anything
that happens in the book).
We know he was alive during the Reagan administration and
we know that 6 months is considered an extreme fast for him. So if you consider
he and his sisters normally kill, what, at least 4 people a year? Uh-huh.
The problem with this is that when we have the inevitable
break-up moment, when she discovers that he actually got close to her
originally on his sister’s orders it makes her look extraordinarily selfish and
self-centred. Sure she can brush off the fact he’s a habitual murderer, but
manipulating her emotions?! How very dare her! Yes, there’s the threat to her father
as well – but there’s still a whole load of “I can ignore your murders so long
as it’s not my family” going on there.
This may also be why I didn’t feel any of the emotional
impact. Whenever Calder tells me yet again how sad and conflicted and torn he is,
it just fell flat. He said it, it was told, but I didn’t get much impression of
it from the page. Similarly, the reasons for his self-loathing just jar me.
Like he hates himself for exploiting Lily. Or Lily is just too good and
innocent to be hurt so… fair enough as reasons go, but
I’m not against a redemption storyline. I’m not against
the monster finding love and giving up his evil ways. I’m not against a monster
in a desperate battle between his conscience and his urges. But we didn’t get
any of that – Calder’s abstinence from killing is presented more as a whim or
eccentricity than any level of contrition or guilt or moral stance. There was
no sense of guilt, no sense of moral analysis – indeed, the closest he got was
concern that he would be “killing someone else’s Lily”. The redemption part of
the redemption storyline, or the battle against his urges or anything else that
presents me an excuse to look past the fact Calder is a mass murderer is
completely missing from the book. Maybe it will develop later in the series –
but his murdering ways were presented as a footnote or a reason why his sisters
are evil, not a reflection on him.
I think this book tried for dark and gritty with its
theme and setting. The murderous merfolk seducing mortals to a watery grave,
bodies, their cruelty, their need for revenge, their merciless beliefs in
justice and debts. All of these could have made it dark and gritty but… didn’t.
Maybe because we spent far more time on how much Calder loved Lily and his jealousy
over her being around another man so the gritty darkness was lost in standard
romance tropes. Maybe it was the aforementioned lack of emotional impact being
conveyed. Or maybe it was simply how the darkness was written – sure we had
Maris excitingly describe how she’d like to torture Hancock, but she’s the
villain, she’s supposed to be nasty. But the other casual deaths were treated
like that, casually. Maybe if they’d have the Hancock family discuss how
horrible it is, or a candlelight vigil for the dead – instead of the bodies
being tossed around casually without any real emotional impact. You can’t
create gritty by killing off some redshirts. At least not without having
someone cry over them. There is just no emotional impact in this book to carry
the theme.
As to the plot in general – romance romance romance with
a slightly shaky premise (perhaps if Mermaid culture had been developed more,
or if Maris hadn’t kept the big secret for so long so there’d be some logical
connection between Granddaddy Hancock’s broken promise and the White’s mother’s
death then it would have made more sense). The pacing was good, it did move
along quickly with minimal distractions. It was focused and concise and pretty
well written in terms of style and balance between description and brevity.
Inclusionwise we had one POC, Parvati, one of the
mermaids who served to be seductive and cruel. I feel she was the one with the
least development, being largely just beautiful and seductive and, alas, “exotic”.
There were several women in the story beyond Lily – the sisters, of course, who
had some of their own motivations but were largely sexual and/or cruel often
for the sake of it, which isn’t the best trope. There was also her friend who
was mainly interested in how hot Calder was and her mother who was also a
disabled woman with MS which conveyed quite well the concept of good and bad
days with disability – and the idea that just because someone is in a
wheelchair some of the time doesn’t mean they have to be all of the time, and
not being in the wheelchair doesn’t mean they’re faking it when they are. There
were no GBLT characters.
In total, I think this was a book with a lot of
potential. Cruel, predatory merfolk rather than the more twee, tragic, romantic
versions Disney has pushed on us. It had an interesting world with hints of an
entirely different culture that had a lot of potential to be fascinating. It
was original, it had a great world, a great concept and there was so much that
could have been developed into a unique, fascinating, dark and exciting Urban
Fantasy.
Unfortunately all that potential was used to tell a
rather clichéd and not particularly fun romance instead.
