From Library Journal

When she was a child, Callie watched her mother drown in the Pacific Ocean. Her father, unwilling to stay in the family's seafront home, moved inland with Callie, where, for nine years, she's experienced inexplicable and debilitating lung problems. That changes when her father takes a job on the Gulf Coast, and Callie finds herself breathing better and finally able to live a normal teenage life; her illness is no longer a barrier between forming friendships and taking part in school activities. Her mother's sister Nessa, a free-spirited surf instructor, visits and teaches her to swim, and Callie feels something awaken inside herself. Its voice is at times overpowering, impacting her worldview and decision-making. Is she suffering a break with reality or is there really something within her that's calling her into the ocean? Why can't she remember the attack on a classmate that she's accused of? The more answers the teen receives—including about her mother's death—the more questions arise. This often eerie novel that toes the line of fantasy is a delight. Readers won't be sure just what it is that has consumed Callie—her own madness, or perhaps, something altogether inhuman—but they'll keep turning pages in hopes of finding out. For fans of E. Lockhart's We Were Liars. ( )

This was a great read. The mythology of older mermaids is very present. The pull towards the ocean and away from land is very strong. I liked that the reader could decide for themselves if what Callie was experiencing was real or not. To me it felt very real but if you wanted to, it could be easily read as not. Callie is a very unreliable narrator and that makes the odd things in this book even odder. She does not know if what she is seeing or feeling is real either. She believes but sometimes there is a thread of doubt. The story is very compelling with a young woman who does not know who she is but wants to so badly. I think that Rosenfield did a good job making Callie believable and pitiable. The world does not believe in mermaids, only in drowning; it does not listen to very sick girls, even when they are telling the truth. Rosenfield makes the reader feel how Callie feels. Pushed aside, forgotten, and no one wants to change that. But Callie does try to fit into humanity but she cannot. As I said this can be read as a horror story about real mermaids or a story about a girl losing her mind. I, personally, pull for mermaids.

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library. ( )

I received this book via the Penguin First to Read program.

I struggled a little with this book at first. But once I got going, I enjoyed the story.

Think about every mermaid story you have ever heard, read or been told. Then imagine that every single one of them had it wrong. Imagine Disney's The Little Mermaid combines with Amanda Hocking's Wake, and then they violently collide with the Grim's Fairy Tale guys, and you might come close.

The situations and settings in this story may not be well suited to younger readers. Though the story is classified as young adult, it is better suited to the more mature end of that spectrum, as younger or more sensitive readers might have nightmares.

As a Florida resident, I thought the setting and backdrop for the Florida part of the story was well researched and accurate.

The fact that Callie would feel and breathe better when she was closer to the water was fairly heavily foreshadowed, though, and I saw that coming. I might have liked it better if a little more were left to the imagination with that part of it, but who knows. I am just one reader in a see of MILLIONS.

If I had to choose a favorite character in this book, it would be a tossup between Bea and Ben. The little girl just tugged at my heartstrings, and who would have thought that her obsession with mermaids would turn out to be pivotal to the story in the end. Ben is just full of sweet innocence and geeky charm. Something about him just made me want to love him, too.

If you read and enjoyed Amanda Hocking's Watersong series, this one is right up your alley. Give it a read. Though it is dark, it is also enthralling.
( )

I received this book via the Penguin First to Read program.

I struggled a little with this book at first. But once I got going, I enjoyed the story.

Think about every mermaid story you have ever heard, read or been told. Then imagine that every single one of them had it wrong. Imagine Disney's The Little Mermaid combines with Amanda Hocking's Wake, and then they violently collide with the Grim's Fairy Tale guys, and you might come close.

The situations and settings in this story may not be well suited to younger readers. Though the story is classified as young adult, it is better suited to the more mature end of that spectrum, as younger or more sensitive readers might have nightmares.

As a Florida resident, I thought the setting and backdrop for the Florida part of the story was well researched and accurate.

The fact that Callie would feel and breathe better when she was closer to the water was fairly heavily foreshadowed, though, and I saw that coming. I might have liked it better if a little more were left to the imagination with that part of it, but who knows. I am just one reader in a see of MILLIONS.

If I had to choose a favorite character in this book, it would be a tossup between Bea and Ben. The little girl just tugged at my heartstrings, and who would have thought that her obsession with mermaids would turn out to be pivotal to the story in the end. Ben is just full of sweet innocence and geeky charm. Something about him just made me want to love him, too.

If you read and enjoyed Amanda Hocking's Watersong series, this one is right up your alley. Give it a read. Though it is dark, it is also enthralling.
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Calypso Morgan and the other members of her family are married to the sea. More to the point, they are in an abusive relationship with the sea, with a very skewed power dynamic. Navy men, surfers, marine biologists, everyone in her family is tied to the sea, and if they try to leave, bad things happen.

Her mother was reclaimed by the ocean when she was 6 - punished for greedily becoming too attached to her husband and family and making the ocean jealous. Her grieving father moved with Callie to New Mexico, Wyoming, and other boring inland places, where Callie, far from her life-giving parent/lover, became like a wheezing beached whale, drowning on land, in and out of the hospital with lung-related ailments. She is invisible or worse to the people at the schools she attends (but never for long).

Callie's father, a scientist and engineer, never wants to live near the ocean after it slurped away his beautiful young wife. But when some oil company bigwig drives a dump truck full of money up to his house to get him to help clean up the aftermath of a Gulf Coast oil spill (that sounds suspiciously like the one caused by BP), he reluctantly moves Callie to Florida, where they have a sweet house, a great school, and the best of hospital care for Callie. She doesn't need it for long, though, because the moist ocean air nourishes her in ways she desperately needed. Her lungs start behaving, her skin clears up, she loses weight, she becomes attractive and healthy and people at her new school like her right away. She even starts dating an handsome and nice classmate, Ben.

Her aunt Nessa, her mom's sister and a California surf instructor, cryptically tries to warn Callie that she can't get too attached to earth things because she wasn't meant to stay here. But she never spells it out explicitly, and Callie doesn't really understand the message. But she slowly starts to hear the call of the sea, and realizes that something is wrong with her. But what?

Just like Kat Rosenfield's last book, the spectacular Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone, everything in this book can be read two different ways. Everything that happens is plausible and explainable with non-Tales From the Crypt explanations. Drownings, dreams, hallucinations, health problems, mental health issues, little girls with big imaginations and poor drawing skills. These things all happen. But the implication - the IMPLICATION, nudge nudge, is that Callie and her family are married to the sea in LITERAL way, and if they don't willingly return to it, it will punish them.

This book is supposed to be about mermaids. But when I read it, if I'm not just reading a book about a normal family of women who go crazy at some point in their adulthood, it's extremely reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but from the point of view of a person born in Innsmouth rather than an outsider. In that story, a man passing through a town discovers that the residents of this town have a bargain with The Deep Ones, a race of horrifying sea creatures, in which they receive prosperity in their fishing industry in exchange for participating in a gross interbreeding program. I'm not sure if Rosenfield has read this story or not, but I am a big Lovecraft fan, and I relished seeing this side of the story.

This book was lush and poetic without being annoyingly overwritten. I'm not sure a lot of teenagers would be into it: I remember being that age and being frustrated when a book teases you like this instead of spelling things out explicitly. And it's very creepy and disturbing, but not in the blood-and-guts way that a lot of kids are looking for. Nonetheless, I loved it, and I anxiously await more from Kat Rosenfield. ( )