Mermaid Challenge Reviews + Follow Friday!

Welcome to the final week 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! This will be the last week for reviews, but I'll do a closing post next week telling who prizes are going to, etc. (Follow Friday below!)

This week, I read two mermaid books. They were Of Poseidon by Anna Banks and Everblue by Brenda Pandos. (Of Poseidon is reviewed below but I didn't quite get through Everblue. I'll probably post it next week in the closing Mermaid Challenge post.)

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So I'd heard lots of good things about Of Poseidon and was excited to read it. I found it on sale on Amazon and got it for cheap and totally did a nerdy little dance about it. Once I started reading it, I was almost immediately disappointed for one reason and one reason only: The POV is split fairly evenly between Galen and Emma. Emma's POV is written in the first person--pretty standard for YA and, as I've learned, mermaid reads especially--but Galen's POV is weird. It's still written in first person but it's written in this bizarre, present tense. That may not seem weird but when you read it...well, let's just say it takes some getting used to. And you do. Get used to it. But at first, I found it very jarring. It just pulled me right out of the story and I had to concentrate to figure out what exactly was being said. I was sure I'd give the book a negative review because of it. 

But...I kept reading and...guess what? I really liked the book. The story was very well-conceptualized, the characters were swoon-worthy and Emma--even though she sometimes came across as a whiny teenager--you just had to admire her spunk. She kept me laughing. And of course you get caught up in the romance and just have to root for the main characters. (It even has great sidekicks in Galen's sister and his meremate, as it were. The ending throws a wild (and delightful) curve ball, and now of course I can't wait to get my hands on book 2, Of Triton. 

So, if you like a great summer read with lots of romance, comedy, and spunk, this is the book for you! I totally loved it. Just don't say I didn't warn you about the weird POV thing. :D

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!

Share something you've learned about book blogging or just blogging in general in the last month.  

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Not sure if this qualifies, but it's all I could think of. Maybe we could say I've known this for awhile, but I've recently learned more about it. In many of my posts, I use colored boxes to put around questions or quotes. I discovered how to do them some time ago--a year or more--through another blogger who'd post an HTML how-to. I always just copied and pasted, changing the color code as I wanted. Unfortunately, the post I've been using was recently taken down, so I had to learn and memorize the actual code. But, here it is:

<blockquote style="background-color: lightblue; border: 2px solid #666; padding: 10px;">

You put that line of HTML before the content you want in the box. At the end of the content you want in the box, you type </blockquote>. If you want a list of color codes, they are HERE.

It ends up looking like this! :D

Anyway, like I said, I've done this for a long time, but I've recently had to learn to type the code rather than just copy and paste. 

So, what have you learned about blogging lately?

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