Follow Friday + Mermaid Challenge Review, Week 4

***Hey Everyone, I have a new email form for those who would like to follow via email. Those who follow via email will get my short story, The Hatching, which usually sells on Amazon for $0.99 for FREE! If you are currently following via GFC, will you follow via Linky, Networked Blogs or email anyway? Thanks a ton! Happy Friday!*** 

Welcome to Week 4 of the Mermaid Lit Summer Reading Challenge! 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! You may join the challenge anytime you like. See rules HERE. (Follow Friday below!)

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This week I read The Forbidden Sea by Sheila A. Neilson. And once again, I am simply floored by how well-written a lot of these books are! I LOVED Forbidden Sea! It was delightful! 

So Adrianne is a fourteen-year-old girl who pretty much supports her entire, destitute family. Her father was killed several years ago in a tragic accident, and ever since then, she's been running the household. She looks after her broken soul of a mother, her sweet--if a bit spoiled at times--younger sister, and her mean-tempered Auntie who she can never seem to please.

Meanwhile, she's crushing hard on the boy who's been her best friend since they were both teeny-boppers, but who sees her as a friend and sister. At the beginning, her younger sister Cecily, after learning that the family can no longer afford to feed their dog and must sell the animal, runs away to the sea to cry and gets herself caught on some dangerous rocks in a storm. Adrianne is the only one who knows her sister well enough to find her, and when she does, she is attacked by a beautiful mermaid that leaves a scar on Adrianne's wrist. 

The rest of the novel is her hearing the mermaid call to her from the sea and avoiding her fate with terror. Something similar happened to a young woman of legend a hundred years before, and she was never seen again. Adrianne has no plan to share that woman's fate. Meanwhile, she's picked on by the rich of the island who look down on her for her poverty, all while fighting to feed her family and keep her Auntie's constant ire from coming down on her. Denn, her crush, often stands up to her, but never in a way that spells romance.

I found this story to be refreshing. It totally kept my attention. I empathized so much with Adrianne. Hers is the plight of any young woman struggling to shoulder a burden too heavy for her shoulders, all while feeling worse than invisible--like the ugly duckling that people can't help but notice. In a bad way. Meanwhile, her young girl heart still dreams of the boy she likes. And now she's got a mermaid after her! 

I pretty much read this in one sitting. I started reading it one day, but only got about twenty pages through it. The next day, I sat down to read...and finished it. Just totally loved this book. It was so touching and well-written that I even got misty-eyed a few times. It's especially surprising that I connected with the main character so much because generally I prefer adult characters to YA ones, but I loved this girl! 

Overall, I totally loved this book. I would recommend it absolutely anyone who is looking for a great read.

*Remember to put your URL in the linky if you did a mermaid review this week!

Has anyone else read The Forbidden Sea? What did you think of it? What other mermaid novels have you read lately?

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: Have you broken up with a series? If so which one and why.

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You know, I can't think of one. I know when I was in high school and got really into high fantasy, I picked up a few off the shelf, and didn't even finish them because they turned out to be thinly disguised porn. But I don't remember what they were.

Other than that, I don't think I have. Not lately, anyway. I have a bit of a completion complex. If I like the first book in a series enough to finish it, I'll probably end up reading the entire series sooner or later. Neurotic? Yeah, probably. But it's okay. I don't mind. :D

(After writing the above, I thought of one. I'm not sure it counts just because I actually read the entire trilogy, but I freaking hated the Millenium trilogy (i.e. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). I enjoyed the whodunit of book 1, and read the 2nd and 3rd books hoping it would get better. I was immensely disappointed in the end of book 3. I felt like the author set us up for something and then changed his mind twenty pages before the end. So, if you can break up with a series after having read the whole thing, I'd go with that one. (Yet another example of my completion complex.) :D

How about you? What series have YOU broken up with lately?

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