Review: Odd and Annoying
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 6, 2014
I’m having a hard time rating this book. Usually the books I rate a 2 are worse than this, but this book left me annoyed so often, I’m not sure it rates a 3. I kept reading, and found parts of it amusing, but I rarely stop reading a book, even a bad one, if the story is one that I want to find out the ending of.If you are put off by the poorly written blurb, trust your instinct and move on. The book is better written, but it has problems large and small.Small: lots of typos, the most numerous being missing quote marks, but you’ll also find a time or two of the “your” instead of  “you’re” type of thing, missing words, and extra words.Annoying: the female lead and the male lead have the SAME LAST NAME, and it’s never explained why or how. There’s no reason for it. They never worry or wonder that they might be closely related. They laugh about it, and it’s only mentioned later as a joke. And it’s not like it’s “Jones” or “Smith” or another equally common name. Yes, coincidences like this happen in real life, but if they are put into fiction, the reader assumes there’s a reason, and is anticipating the reveal. But no, no reason here.Annoying: it was hard to remember the female lead’s name. This doesn’t usually happen to me, and I couldn’t figure out for awhile why I kept thinking “wait, who is Ann?” whenever another character used her name. So I went back and skimmed, and figured out that the author never used her name in the narrative. It’s only in dialogue when someone else calls her that, or when she introduces herself. I had come to think of this gal as “She” because that’s the only thing she’s ever called. I’ve never come across this in a book before, and when I figured it out about halfway through, it became a little stick poking at me as I continued reading. This is made worse when the other characters also refer to her by her stage name “Arianna.”Annoying: This gal makes lots of bad choices. She’s supposed to be unable to trust and rely on anyone else because her parents were killed in a fire. Okay. But then she pushes away the one man she can clearly trust, and readily trusts several other people far more a few days later. She is given a ring with the admonition “Tell no one.” So she tells the first person she comes across. And then pretty much everyone else she encounters after that. Yes, she turns into a mermaid in the water. “Tell no one,” remember? So she gets a job at Sea Kingdom as—wait for it—a mermaid! It’s not like anyone will ever FIND OUT SHE’S A MERMAID. She is strongly attracted to David, but pushes him away because she thinks depending on him and falling in love with him will kill her dream (wait, what? Eventually we find out what that dream is…). A few days later she goes out on a date with a STRANGER who says she’s pretty, AFTER she’s been threatened by people who want to know her secret.Annoying: There is a lot of build-up in this novel that goes nowhere. The author is pretty good at building tension, but he rarely uses it. There are odd scenes that seem to be building to something… but, no. Just a scene. Big build-up to a fancy date with David, and skip to the next day. We don’t even get to see them on the date. It happens again and again, letdown after letdown. It’s overly dense and detail-filled writing for what we actually get.Annoyance: the magic ring pretty much just makes all her problems go away. Or they go away on their own. This ties into the letdown mentioned already. A reporter starts sneaking around after her. She tells him to go away, and he does. Simple. The guys she works with threaten her. David tells them to go away, and they do. Simple. Another couple of things that would be huge spoilers, so I won’t say… except to say that the problems just go away with no real effort on her part. The magic ring is basically the key to the kingdom of happiness and riches. She just has to come to the conclusion that “All you need is love.” What a letdown.And oh gosh, the ending. I won’t give it away, but suffice it to say that the characters acted in a completely unbelievable and cavalier way. My mouth was hanging open. What? Seriously?After spelling it all out, I’m annoyed all over again, so I’m going with the 2 stars.