Review: Forgive My Fins by Tera Lynn Childs

From Goodreads:

Lily Sanderson has a secret, and it’s not that she has a huge crush on gorgeous swimming god Brody Bennett, who makes her heart beat flipper-fast. Unrequited love is hard enough when you’re a normal teenage girl, but when you’re half human, half mermaid like Lily, there’s no such thing as a simple crush.

Lily’s mermaid identity is a secret that can’t get out, since she’s not just any mermaid – she’s a Thalassinian princess. When Lily found out three years ago that her mother was actually a human, she finally realized why she didn’t feel quite at home in Thalassinia, and she’s been living on land and going to Seaview high school ever since, hoping to find where she truly belongs. Sure, land has its problems – like her obnoxious, biker boy neighbor Quince Fletcher – but it has that one major perk – Brody. The problem is, mermaids aren’t really the casual dating type – when they “bond,” it’s for life.

When Lily’s attempt to win Brody’s love leads to a tsunami-sized case of mistaken identity, she is in for a tidal wave of relationship drama, and she finds out, quick as a tailfin flick, that happily-ever-after never sails quite as smoothly as you planned.

My Rating:
2 stars

Thoughts:

I started reading this book with a bit of skepticism, since mermaids are usually the subject of children’s books and little cutesy stories. There was the potential for this to twist that stereotype around and create its own original breed of mermaid (like the man-eating mermaids in Pirates of the Caribbean – they were awesome). Sadly, that isn’t the case in Forgive My Fins, which was a sometimes-painful mash up of an irritating heroine who uses cutesy ocean words in practically every other sentence (ex:  her heart was beating “flipper-fast”). The guy she was obsessed with had little to no merit, and it was obvious from the start what was going to happen by the end of the book. The thing that bugged me the most was when Lily goes back to her kingdom, and they had things that humans use, only their names had been slightly changed so they sounded like they came from the ocean. Mermaids eat sushi in this story (since rice would keep so well in ocean water…), but they use “seasticks”, which the heroine explains are the mermaid equivalent of chopsticks. Apparently if you change half of a word to “sea” then it’s automatically something that mermaids use. I’m not buying it.

                The only redeeming qualities about this book were certain points in the relationship between Quince and Lily, and the idea of “mermaid bonding”. Other than that, I had trouble finishing this book because it was mostly Lily complaining about the fact that Brody didn’t love her. That got old really fast.

The author’s writing style wasn’t bad, and that was probably one of the very few reasons why I was able to finish this book. I might be a little biased because I’m used to reading darker paranormal books, but the mermaids were just way too cutesy for me. With a lot of ironing out, this could be a good story. But before then, I wouldn’t recommend reading Forgive My Fins.