Review: Tangled Tides

Tangled Tides
Karen Amanda Hooper
3.5/5.0

Yara Jones doesn't believe in sea monsters--until she becomes one.

When a hurricane hits her island home and she wakes up with fins, Yara finds herself tangled up in an underwater world of mysterious merfolk and secretive selkies. Both sides believe Yara can save them by fulfilling a broken promise and opening the sealed gateway to their realm, but they are battling over how it should be done. The selkies want to take her life. The merfolk want something far more precious.

Treygan, the stormy-eyed merman who turned Yara mer, will stop at nothing and sacrifice everything to protect his people--until he falls for Yara. The tides turn as Yara fights to save herself, hundreds of sea creatures, and the merman who has her heart. She could lose her soul in the process--or she might open the gateway to a love that's deeper than the oceans.Overall, its a pretty good story.  The premise is interesting enough, and I didn't want to murder the characters.  The plot kept me invested, and I got rather anxious towards the end.

I certainly recommend the book to someone into mermaids and romance and the like.

I liked the characters for the most part, although I did find Yara a little whiny.  I let it slide because I could understand why she would react the way she did to things.  I liked Treygan, but he definitely didn't fall into the book boyfriend category.  I felt like he was a good match for Yara though.  I even liked the supporting characters, although I was really unsure about the Sirens up until the bitter end.

I think it was the little things that led to me dropping the rating more than anything.  The "seagarettes" and "c-weed" just seemed silly and somewhat ridiculous to me.

And the whole, "I can't have sex with you or kiss you, so I'm going to write love notes on your skin from head to to toe" was just a little to ewwy-gooey romance-y for me.

The end didn't really do much for me either.  GRANTED, it's not a bad end, and some people will love it.  However, there wasn't much of a cliffhanger, and it doesn't give me a whole lot of incentive to want to read the next book.  It was all pretty much tied up in a pretty bow at the end.  Like I said, I'm sure some people prefer that to the gut-wrenching cliffhangers I prefer, but to me it was a let down.

I certainly wouldn't want to discourage people from at least giving the book a shot, because a lot of people really loved it, and I *liked* it.  It just isn't on my top 10 list.