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3.34 AVERAGE
3.34 AVERAGE
A sweet book, an easy read, and predictable. I enjoyed the story, didn't fully understand the mythology, and at times felt like the world building was suddenly dropped. This book would be appropriate for a tween crowd, nothing graphic and pretty simple.
The Mermaid's Mirror was like a long awaited vacation that I didn't want to end! If you like YA fiction with a twist then I highly suggest The Mermaid's Mirror! Mermaid's are defiantly the next big thing! :)
I am SO glad I was able to review this book! If you plan to spend a day at the beach reading, this is the book you want to take. And if, like me, you're in the middle of cold weather, it will bring a fresh sea breeze to your mind. It's chock full of beaches, surfing, underwater scenery, mystery, and of course mermaids.
I think Madigan did a wonderful job writing this book. I liked that she sometimes used texts and IMs as a form of communication, which really brought it into today's world. The songs and poems were interesting, and added value to the story. And the mermaids! Well, you'll just have to read it for yourself to find out about them. :)
I liked the main character, and loved following along as she tried to solve the mystery behind her father's surfing accident. I didn't care too much for her boyfriend, though. Sometimes he seemed a little too perky, and at other times, a little too pressing on the "let's be alone together" begging. I'm all for hot, tempting guys, but a few of his lines made him sound like a bit of a jerk to me.
Aside from that this was a fun adventure, and although the book can stand on it's own, I find myself hoping for a sequel (please, L.K. Madigan?!).
The book releases later this year, so check it out! I recommend it if you're looking for a fun read, like the sea, and believe in mermaids!
I was able to review this book thanks to: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via NetGalley.
I think Madigan did a wonderful job writing this book. I liked that she sometimes used texts and IMs as a form of communication, which really brought it into today's world. The songs and poems were interesting, and added value to the story. And the mermaids! Well, you'll just have to read it for yourself to find out about them. :)
I liked the main character, and loved following along as she tried to solve the mystery behind her father's surfing accident. I didn't care too much for her boyfriend, though. Sometimes he seemed a little too perky, and at other times, a little too pressing on the "let's be alone together" begging. I'm all for hot, tempting guys, but a few of his lines made him sound like a bit of a jerk to me.
Aside from that this was a fun adventure, and although the book can stand on it's own, I find myself hoping for a sequel (please, L.K. Madigan?!).
The book releases later this year, so check it out! I recommend it if you're looking for a fun read, like the sea, and believe in mermaids!
I was able to review this book thanks to: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via NetGalley.
I really liked "The Mermaid's Mirror". Its something different from what I've been reading lately and so I found it as a breath of fresh air. The story was very creative and I sure hope there is a sequel because I would love to read it.
Lena has been watching all her friends surf but she was never able to. Her dad had an accident early back and almost died, so he isn't even willing to step in the water much less teach her how to surf.
For Lena's 16th birthday, her boyfriend's, Kai, sister offers to give her surfing lessons. So she can't stand not surfing any longer and eventually accepts. Lena has this pull torward the water. She walks along the beach just about everyday and on her 16th birthday, she swears that she sees a mermaid. A beautiful mermaid. She is determined, against her father's wishes, to learn to surf so she can explore the waves ans search for the mermaid. Once she learns, she takes her board out to Magic Crescent Cove when even the experienced surfers won't surf that day. She's out in the ocean surfing and then she is caught in the rip tide. While she is in the riptide, the mermaid puts a key into her hand. Now she knows that she's not crazy and there really is a mermaid out there. The key has to fit in something so she starts searching every key hole she can find. When she's snooping through her parents room, she finds a death certificate from her birth mother's suicide. Then she is about to give up before she gets caught, when she sees a chair in a spot where it wouldn't be of any use. She moves it and pulls up the carpet and finds a sea chest. Bingo! The key fit. When she opens the chest, she finds photos and other items along with a mirror. Lena looks into the mirror and is shown the sea and mer-people. From then on, Lena's life will never be the same. Her dad comes home and confesses the truth about her mother. Now that Lena knows, what will she do? Will she stay on land with her family or will she stop resisting the call of the sea?
This was a quick and fast paced read. It was non stop entertainment for me. The story was full of mystery, friendship, trust and love. When it ended, I was heartbroken. I personally wouldn't be able to make the decision that she does. How do you choose between family? Lena learns to trust her own heart in the end, even if it hurts herself and those she loves. If you're tired from the recent vampire craze and want something a little different, read this. It was a super cute story!
Lena has been watching all her friends surf but she was never able to. Her dad had an accident early back and almost died, so he isn't even willing to step in the water much less teach her how to surf.
For Lena's 16th birthday, her boyfriend's, Kai, sister offers to give her surfing lessons. So she can't stand not surfing any longer and eventually accepts. Lena has this pull torward the water. She walks along the beach just about everyday and on her 16th birthday, she swears that she sees a mermaid. A beautiful mermaid. She is determined, against her father's wishes, to learn to surf so she can explore the waves ans search for the mermaid. Once she learns, she takes her board out to Magic Crescent Cove when even the experienced surfers won't surf that day. She's out in the ocean surfing and then she is caught in the rip tide. While she is in the riptide, the mermaid puts a key into her hand. Now she knows that she's not crazy and there really is a mermaid out there. The key has to fit in something so she starts searching every key hole she can find. When she's snooping through her parents room, she finds a death certificate from her birth mother's suicide. Then she is about to give up before she gets caught, when she sees a chair in a spot where it wouldn't be of any use. She moves it and pulls up the carpet and finds a sea chest. Bingo! The key fit. When she opens the chest, she finds photos and other items along with a mirror. Lena looks into the mirror and is shown the sea and mer-people. From then on, Lena's life will never be the same. Her dad comes home and confesses the truth about her mother. Now that Lena knows, what will she do? Will she stay on land with her family or will she stop resisting the call of the sea?
This was a quick and fast paced read. It was non stop entertainment for me. The story was full of mystery, friendship, trust and love. When it ended, I was heartbroken. I personally wouldn't be able to make the decision that she does. How do you choose between family? Lena learns to trust her own heart in the end, even if it hurts herself and those she loves. If you're tired from the recent vampire craze and want something a little different, read this. It was a super cute story!
adventurous
challenging
emotional
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, because part of the fun of The Mermaid’s Mirror was reading along as Lena discovered the truth about herself and her family. The pacing is a bit leisurely, but that’s to allow Lena the time to work out who she is and what she wants out of life. I loved the emphasis that’s put on the importance of family, and what it means to be part of a family. I thought that the character interaction was the strength of this book, and it’s what kept me reading.
Read the full review here:
http://www.mangamaniaccafe.com/?p=4483
Read the full review here:
http://www.mangamaniaccafe.com/?p=4483
I really liked this book. It was a little predictable but a good bowl of chips sort of book!
I liked the idea of the story, but I wish there was more action. I also wish that Selena was a more realistic teenager, and that some of her inconsistencies were fixed.
THE BLURB:
Lena, almost 16 and living in a northern California surfing community, has been forbidden by her father, a former surfer who suffered a terrible accident in the water years ago, from learning her peers’ favorite sport. She is an excellent swimmer, though, and while spending time at the local beach, she begins to think she might be seeing a mermaid out in the waves. Being a practical girl, this of course strikes her as unlikely, but a host of subtle clues that include the discovery of her mother’s true identity and fate lead her to an undersea world of mer-folk. Lena distances herself from her life on land as she takes up residence in her mother’s community below the ocean, but eventually she must choose between her diverging destinies.
THE REVIEW:
THE MERMAID'S MIRROR is a difficult book to review, because in many ways - like the main character, Lena - it seems to be at war with itself.
The earlier sections of the story, showing aspiring surfer Lena both struggling with and reveling in her home life, her complex relationships with friend and boyfriend and the emergence of disturbing impulses (the urge to search for something she does not remember, the constant need to be by the sea) are compelling and beautifully written. I completely sympathised with Lena in her quest to discover the truth about her mysterious mother, and found the secondary characters to be well-rounded and intriguing. The setting was a little sketchy on the details of school and hometown, but enough detail was lavished on the beach, sea and rocks to make up for this and give the story a rich sense of place.
One thing I very much liked about this early section was the heroine's boyfriend, Kai, who is sweet, attentive and interested in her. The heroine wavered on her feelings about him, sometimes seeming to find him too clingy, and maybe wishing that they could return to just being friends, and at others seeming to appreciate his quirky humour and wanting to be with him. I thought this was a refreshingly different and realistic take on a high school relationship.
However, after a heart-wrenching and very effective scene where the heroine finds her mother clinging to the rocks and plunges under the waves with her into a new, undersea world, the book completely lost its grip on me. The formerly strong and determined heroine suddenly seemed flat and even rather annoying at times, repeating the same questions and thoughts over and over. The world that she inhabited seemed overly simplistic, like a brightly coloured set of sketches from a young child's picture book - complete with heavy-handed ecological messages - and the mermaid and merman characters frankly felt like ciphers, pale imitations of their land-based counterparts. A couple of times I even found myself wondering if the whole thing was a dream that Lena was having.
The heroine falls in love almost at once with an ultra dreamy merman hunk called Nix. Although he seems inoffensive enough, I simply had no idea what made him tick, or why he would fall head over flippers in love with 'child of land and sea' who had legs instead of a tail. Similarly, apart from his perfect body and 'green-gold' hair, I couldn't figure out why Lena, who a few pages before had been unsure about her feelings for Kai, was suddenly willing to undergo a mermaid marriage ceremony and commit to Nix for life. Yes, her memories of her other life had been blurred away, but would that really change her essentially independent and inquistive nature?
There was also a puzzling plot cul-de-sac where the heroine seeks the help of a Sand Goddess in order to find out how to get a tail. The Goddess herself was satisfyingly remote and inhuman, and I expected to see some sort of pay-off for this section, but once the heroine learns that she CAN get a tail, she leaves the cavern of the Goddess and never returns, the whole idea abandoned.
At the end of this undersea adventure the heroine regains her memories of her family on land and instantly decides to return to them, without even saying goodbye to Nix. There was some very quick and almost perfunctory angsting over this decision, and the painful leave taking seemed to be over in a couple of pages. The conditions imposed on Lena by her grandparents - never to return to the undersea village or to see her mother again - once more felt jarringly simplistic and more a result of a plot need to ratchett up the emotional tension than of anything embedded in the characters.
In the acknowledgements at the back of THE MERMAID'S MIRROR the author mentions that this was once a middle grade book, later re-written as a YA. Reading this gave me an 'aaah' moment, because it explained to me why the two halfs of the story felt so ill-joined. After the subtle and complex writing in the land section, the undersea part felt vitally flawed, almost as if it belonged to a different - and far less interesting - book. I think the blend between YA and middle grade here is far from smooth and that the whole undersea section could really have done with being rethought and rewritten.
THE MERMAID'S MIRROR is frustrating because in some ways it's just the kind of book that I'd like to see more of, a book in which the heroine's own quest for knowledge and growth is emphasized over any mystical One Twu Wuv connection with a supernatural boy. I'm really sad that the whole thing didn't work better.
Lena, almost 16 and living in a northern California surfing community, has been forbidden by her father, a former surfer who suffered a terrible accident in the water years ago, from learning her peers’ favorite sport. She is an excellent swimmer, though, and while spending time at the local beach, she begins to think she might be seeing a mermaid out in the waves. Being a practical girl, this of course strikes her as unlikely, but a host of subtle clues that include the discovery of her mother’s true identity and fate lead her to an undersea world of mer-folk. Lena distances herself from her life on land as she takes up residence in her mother’s community below the ocean, but eventually she must choose between her diverging destinies.
THE REVIEW:
THE MERMAID'S MIRROR is a difficult book to review, because in many ways - like the main character, Lena - it seems to be at war with itself.
The earlier sections of the story, showing aspiring surfer Lena both struggling with and reveling in her home life, her complex relationships with friend and boyfriend and the emergence of disturbing impulses (the urge to search for something she does not remember, the constant need to be by the sea) are compelling and beautifully written. I completely sympathised with Lena in her quest to discover the truth about her mysterious mother, and found the secondary characters to be well-rounded and intriguing. The setting was a little sketchy on the details of school and hometown, but enough detail was lavished on the beach, sea and rocks to make up for this and give the story a rich sense of place.
One thing I very much liked about this early section was the heroine's boyfriend, Kai, who is sweet, attentive and interested in her. The heroine wavered on her feelings about him, sometimes seeming to find him too clingy, and maybe wishing that they could return to just being friends, and at others seeming to appreciate his quirky humour and wanting to be with him. I thought this was a refreshingly different and realistic take on a high school relationship.
However, after a heart-wrenching and very effective scene where the heroine finds her mother clinging to the rocks and plunges under the waves with her into a new, undersea world, the book completely lost its grip on me. The formerly strong and determined heroine suddenly seemed flat and even rather annoying at times, repeating the same questions and thoughts over and over. The world that she inhabited seemed overly simplistic, like a brightly coloured set of sketches from a young child's picture book - complete with heavy-handed ecological messages - and the mermaid and merman characters frankly felt like ciphers, pale imitations of their land-based counterparts. A couple of times I even found myself wondering if the whole thing was a dream that Lena was having.
The heroine falls in love almost at once with an ultra dreamy merman hunk called Nix. Although he seems inoffensive enough, I simply had no idea what made him tick, or why he would fall head over flippers in love with 'child of land and sea' who had legs instead of a tail. Similarly, apart from his perfect body and 'green-gold' hair, I couldn't figure out why Lena, who a few pages before had been unsure about her feelings for Kai, was suddenly willing to undergo a mermaid marriage ceremony and commit to Nix for life. Yes, her memories of her other life had been blurred away, but would that really change her essentially independent and inquistive nature?
There was also a puzzling plot cul-de-sac where the heroine seeks the help of a Sand Goddess in order to find out how to get a tail. The Goddess herself was satisfyingly remote and inhuman, and I expected to see some sort of pay-off for this section, but once the heroine learns that she CAN get a tail, she leaves the cavern of the Goddess and never returns, the whole idea abandoned.
At the end of this undersea adventure the heroine regains her memories of her family on land and instantly decides to return to them, without even saying goodbye to Nix. There was some very quick and almost perfunctory angsting over this decision, and the painful leave taking seemed to be over in a couple of pages. The conditions imposed on Lena by her grandparents - never to return to the undersea village or to see her mother again - once more felt jarringly simplistic and more a result of a plot need to ratchett up the emotional tension than of anything embedded in the characters.
In the acknowledgements at the back of THE MERMAID'S MIRROR the author mentions that this was once a middle grade book, later re-written as a YA. Reading this gave me an 'aaah' moment, because it explained to me why the two halfs of the story felt so ill-joined. After the subtle and complex writing in the land section, the undersea part felt vitally flawed, almost as if it belonged to a different - and far less interesting - book. I think the blend between YA and middle grade here is far from smooth and that the whole undersea section could really have done with being rethought and rewritten.
THE MERMAID'S MIRROR is frustrating because in some ways it's just the kind of book that I'd like to see more of, a book in which the heroine's own quest for knowledge and growth is emphasized over any mystical One Twu Wuv connection with a supernatural boy. I'm really sad that the whole thing didn't work better.