Review: Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown

Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown
Goodreads | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble
YA, Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Paranormal Romance, 303 pages, Delacorte Books for Young Readers

• Series: 1st in Lies Beneath
• Pub date: June 12th 2012
• Disclosure: Received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley. Thanks!

Judged by its cover: Better than your average mermaid book, but still not great. I like the font, but the girl's face looks like a graphic  design class project gone wrong.

Goodreads blurb:

Calder White lives in the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior, the only brother in a family of murderous mermaids. To survive, Calder and his sisters prey on humans, killing them to absorb their energy. But this summer the underwater clan targets Jason Hancock out of pure revenge. They blame Hancock for their mother's death and have been waiting a long time for him to return to his family's homestead on the lake. Hancock has a fear of water, so to lure him in, Calder sets out to seduce Hancock's daughter, Lily. Easy enough — especially as Calder has lots of practice using his irresistible good looks and charm on unsuspecting girls. Only this time Calder screws everything up: he falls for Lily — just as Lily starts to suspect that there's more to the monsters-in-the-lake legends than she ever imagined. And just as his sisters are losing patience with him.

The Long...

It's cliche advice in YA: your first ten pages are critical. Polish them first, and the rest comes later. Better make them good or you'll lose your reader, and so on and so forth. The thing about this cliche? It's absolutely true, and even with my expert slogging techniques that can get me through all but the most insufferable slow beginnings, it's still a delight to find a book with a first chapter as tightly crafted and riveting as Lies Beneath's.

The story unfolds eerily, with the pieces of Brown's intriguing mermaid mythology falling into place in slow motion. She gives us just enough to keep going, but never enough to infodump. Calder is an enigma even as he shares his story in the first person, and best of all, Brown fully embraces the creepy stalker aspect of paranormal romance instead of attempting to explain her hero's behavior away. Calder is aware that what he's doing is wrong, and he could help it, but he chooses not to--he decides to be creepy, to get that job at the coffeeshop, to follow Lily home--and we forgive him, despite our better judgment. He and his sisters are so compellingly not human, in the tradition of the best fairy tales, that we are captivated. We don't fully understand their need for revenge, but we, too, seek blood.

Of course the story derails right around the time Calder and the somewhat bland Lily (spoiler alert) fall in love--is that really a spoiler, though?--when we descend into extended chaste kissing and snuggling scenes, and a somewhat predictable emotional and action-packed climax. Still, the sheer volume of mermaid romance stories told since time immemorial make it difficult to do anything exactly fresh with the material, and Brown does an admirable job with what she has been given.

One of my personal favorite quirks of this story is its setting on Lake Superior, instead of the more traditional mermaid setting on a sunny beach. While I've never been to the Apostle Islands, I've spent a great deal of time on Superior's North Shore, and I can say firsthand that its rocky foreboding is the perfect place for the homicidal mermaid revenge fantasy romance subgenre.

All in all, it's one of the better paranormal romance novels out there, especially for those who like assassination attempts along with their flirty banter.

...and the Short:

Not your typical mermaid story--tightly plotted and crafted, with an engaging and enigmatic narrator. Even if the story descends into well-trodden paranormal romance territory about halfway through, it's still great fun in a gorgeous setting.

The Final Word: Liked it. 

Review: The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa

The Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa
Goodreads | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble
YA, Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Dystopia/Romance,485 pages, Harlequin Teen

• Series: first in the Blood of Eden series
• Pub date: April 24th 2012
• Disclosure: Received a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley. Thanks!

Judged by its cover: One of the worst I've seen all year. Not only is the design itself pretty ugly, but--and I know I've beat this horse to death on Twitter--it's whitewashed. The protagonist, Allie Sekemoto, is clearly described as Asian, specifically Japanese (one character calls her squinty-eyed, and she fights with katanas, among other references). I'm not really sure what would have been so hard about getting an actual Asian model to do the shoot (and this was definitely a photo shoot, not a stock photo), but they didn't, and that makes me angry.

Goodreads blurb:

In a future world, Vampires reign. Humans are blood cattle. And one girl will search for the key to save humanity.
Allison Sekemoto survives in the Fringe, the outermost circle of a vampire city. By day, she and her crew scavenge for food. By night, any one of them could be eaten.
Some days, all that drives Allie is her hatred of them. The vampires who keep humans as blood cattle. Until the night Allie herself is attacked—and given the ultimate choice. Die… or become one of the monsters.
Faced with her own mortality, Allie becomes what she despises most. To survive, she must learn the rules of being immortal, including the most important: go long enough without human blood, and you will go mad.
Then Allie is forced to flee into the unknown, outside her city walls. There she joins a ragged band of humans who are seeking a legend—a possible cure to the disease that killed off most of humankind and created the rabids, the mindless creatures who threaten humans and vampires alike.
But it isn’t easy to pass for human. Especially not around Zeke, who might see past the monster inside her. And Allie soon must decide what—and who—is worth dying for.

The Long...

I've heard a lot of grumbling about this book around the blogosphere, mostly related to how it's not as good as Kagawa's previous Iron Fey series. As I have not read Iron Fey (I know, I know), I came in with fresh eyes and carefully managed expectations. And you know what? The Immortal Rules met them, and turned out to be a pleasant, terrific read in the summer sun.

It's funny how dystopia has become so prevalent in YA that I can call The Immortal Rules an escapist read, but surprisingly, it is. Allie's journey from embittered human to badass vampire-in-training to entirely more vulnerable girl in love follows all the right formulas with very few surprises--by throwing in not just a dystopia, not just vampires, but zombies, too, Kagawa ensures she has a decent selection of tropes to draw from. Normally, "no surprises" is not exactly what I want to be thinking about a book, I've blasted a story for less in the past, and maybe had it not been summer and lovely and made-for-romance-reading outside, I would have felt less charitable. But honestly, it was nice for once to just sit back and get transported away to Kagawa's not-so-original-but-still-pretty-interesting world.

By far the most exciting parts of the book are Allie's training sessions after she is killed and resurrected as undead (no spoilers there, as it happens so quickly and inevitably) by a much older, enigmatic vampire--with whom she has mad chemistry, I might add. I settled in for the romance to begin there, but alas, much melodrama and derring-do later, Allie takes off for the hills to meet a rag-tag band of humans that feel like something right out of Stephen King's The Stand (also not particularly a spoiler). In fact, for a romance novel, I struggled with the romance more than any other part of this book. Human Zeke is blandly, blindly good with no hidden bad boy depths to plumb, and I was left wondering why Allie--who seems so snarky and street-smart, after all--seemed to have so much competition for his attentions. It's not bad, exactly, but it didn't leave my heart racing, either.

If Kagawa had stuck more with the vampire part of the story rather than the dystopian, and given us more  badass katana fights and hospital raids and vampire catfights, then we'd be looking at one of the best cult-classic campy books I've read lately. But it falls short of that. Still, if you're in the mood for a decent genre mash-up, this is the book for you.

...and the Short:

A fun, campy genre mash-up that, if not scintillating, is definitely entertaining. The romance leaves something to be desired, but our snarky, street-smart, katana-wielding heroine more than makes up for it.

The Final Word: Liked it.