Finished Fathomless by Jackson Pearce. I received a copy from the publisher at BEA.
Summary (from Goodreads):
“Celia Reynolds is the youngest in a set of triplets and the one with the least valuable power. Anne can see the future, and Jane can see the present, but all Celia can see is the past. And the past seems so insignificant — until Celia meets Lo.
Lo doesn’t know who she is. Or who she was. Once a human, she is now almost entirely a creature of the sea — a nymph, an ocean girl, a mermaid — all terms too pretty for the soulless monster she knows she’s becoming. Lo clings to shreds of her former self, fighting to remember her past, even as she’s tempted to embrace her dark immortality.
When a handsome boy named Jude falls off a pier and into the ocean, Celia and Lo work together to rescue him from the waves. The two form a friendship, but soon they find themselves competing for Jude’s affection. Lo wants more than that, though. According to the ocean girls, there’s only one way for Lo to earn back her humanity. She must persuade a mortal to love her . . . and steal his soul.”
This is obviously a retelling of The Little Mermaid (the original one; not that thing Disney did). You can tell because it hurts to walk when Lo is on land. (And also she can talk, so there’s that.)
I wanted so much to love this book and I just didn’t. My problem was that I didn’t really care as much about Lo as I did about Celia and her sisters. I wanted to know more about them, so the mermaid/Lo chapters weren’t anywhere near as interesting to me.
I also tend to prefer more contemporary YA these days (I absolutely loved Jackson Pearce’s novel Purity). But this is still an entertaining read. I just hope her next novel is more like Purity.
