Follow Friday + Mermaid Lit Challenge Review, Week 2

(Follow Friday down below) 

Here's to two weeks of mermaid lit! Below is my review for this week. If you have one of your own, feel free to link up with us and be sure to visit the others to see what they thought of their reads for this week!

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The book I read this week for the mermaid challenge (while I was vacationing at Bear Lake in Northern Utah, no less!) was Florence by Ciye Cho. 

I was very uncertain about this book. First off, the author is a man but the main character is a teenage girl. I wasn't sure those two things would mix. Plus, it's a very cheap book in the Kindle store, and I'm always a bit wary of that. But, it had great reviews. Lots of people gave it 5 stars on Goodreads.com, so I decided to try it.

And I'm so glad I did!

Florence is a wonderful mermaid story. Florence is an introverted, uncertain teenage girl who is used to being invisible. During a class field to the coast, she goes snorkeling by herself (no real friends) and is pulled under the waves by a merman, who takes her to his prince. The ways in which she can breathe and talk underwater are...well, I won't say realistic, but believable. And Florence begins an underwater adventure, not just to help iron out the troubles of the mer-world, but to find herself and her place in it.

I really admire the way Cho does the back story. At the beginning, we learn that Flo is introverted and has low self-esteem, with few friends, but we can tell all that just by interaction between her and her classmates. The author doesn't info-dump about her dry-land situation or her family. We learn that as it becomes relevant to the unraveling story.

There are also two princes underwater that Florence may or may not end up in a relationship with. It's not really a love triangle, for those who are bothered by that, but rather her trying to decide which one is being honest and which one is using her. Both are equally good-looking and confusing as to their motivations. Trying to figure out the two brothers made the story fun and engaging.

We meet plenty of interesting underwater creatures--totally in love with her little octopus buddy!--including some wicked-scary monsters that I greatly enjoyed. 

Complaints? A few, but negligible. There were a few stylistic things that probably on a writer would pick up on. And I would have liked a little more description about how things were done underwater as opposed to as they would have been done on land. There were some things that I couldn't quite picture. But, these were minor problems that didn't really take away from the story.

Overall, I really liked this book and will be reading book 2. I would recommend it to anyone who likes YA romance, adventure, mermaid-themed stories, or hot mermen! 

What mermaid-themed books have you read?

Follow Friday

Gain new followers and make new friends with the Book Blogger Feature & Follow! If this is your first time here, welcome! You are about to make some new friends and gain new followers -- but you have to know -- the point of this hop is to follow other bloggers also. I follow you, you follow me.

The Feature & Follow is hosted by TWO hosts, Parajunkee of Parajunkee's View and Alison of Alison Can Read. Each host will have their own Feature Blog and this way it'll allow us to show off more new blogs! 

How does this work? First you leave your name here on this post, (using the linky tools -- keep scrolling!) then you create a post on your own blog that links back to this post (easiest way is to just grab the code under the #FF picture and put it in your post) and then you visit as many blogs as you can and tell them "hi" in their comments (on the post that has the #FF image). You follow them, they follow you. Win. Win. Just make sure to follow back if someone follows you!

Q: The #FF is 150 weeks old! And we want to hear from you! What would you change about the hop? What do you like about it? Or just suggest a question to be used for next week!

Hmm. How about a question? Problem is, I've only been doing it for about 50 weeks, so I don't know all of the questions that have been asked. How about, "what book or books have changed your life and why/how?" or "have you ever recommended a book to someone else and seen a positive reaction when they read it? (And what was it?)" I think those would be fun questions. ;D

What would YOUR questions/suggestions be?

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