Between the Land and the Sea by Derrolyn Anderson

Something extraordinary is lurking in the deep ocean waters off the coast of Aptos, California. In just a few weeks after moving to the small beach town, sixteen year old Marina has nearly drowned twice, enchanted the hottest guy in high school, and discovered a supernatural creature. If she can only manage to survive her increasingly dangerous encounters with unpredictable mermaids, she might just be able to unlock the mystery of her past to learn how to appease the mysterious forces that seem to want something from her...and maybe even find true love along the way.

I love mermaid books. I am a diehard Little Mermaid fan and actually had a dream once that I had a fishy tail – very cool. So I jumped to the shopping basket when I saw this book on Amazon.

And, it as a good read, don’t get me wrong but I felt like it was missing something.  It kept me reading because I was desperate to see how it would end but it didn’t have a spark. Yeah, I’m warbling a little here so I’ll move on.

One thing that made this book a little bit of a drag for me was the constant designer references. I don’t really care if a bag comes from Harrods or Primark (FYI – Brit thing) all that matters is that I can put stuff in it. Same goes for shoes. I don’t care as long as I can walk in them. And while I am on the subject of designer gear I’ll say that Marina’s attitude towards it annoyed me. She was saying throughout that she didn’t care about designer stuff and could make do without but she didn’t even try as far as I could see. She struck me as being spoilt.

The idea that her father has had to travel a lot for his work and that she has spent most of her life living out of a suit case was a pretty nifty idea and I would have liked to have seen that developed a little bit more. And to say that she has had all this experience in other countries she struck me as being a little but childish and shallow at times and not terribly mature.

Now onto the good stuff.  I loved how the mermaid aspect of the story was handled. The playful, childish yet ageless way that the author painted them was great - also the whole seeing the future thing…that’s cool. Totally couldn’t have seen that one coming (no pun intended).

My favourite character had to be Marina’s cousin. He was a sweetheart. He tried to talk Marina out of doing things that he thought were dangerous and then when he could talk her out of them he went along to make sure she was safe. That gives him a whopping great big star in my book.

And then we have the love interest. He was OK I suppose. We of course have the compulsory misunderstanding/breakup thing that you could see coming a mile away but he was  there for her when she needed him.

So…3 out of 5 stars. Maybe when I am feeling more generous I’ll look back and give it 4 but right now I’m thinking 5.