Review: Mermaids of the future.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 9, 2011
First the good... Great premise!  Kudos to Ami Blackwelder for the idea.  This is a dystopian future that I've never thought of, much less read about.  I thought the author did a great job thinking this world up along with the strife and tension between the "races" in the different areas of it.  The "Aristos", the "Mers", the "Commoners", the "Magi"s" and all the rest were very well imagined. And the horror of the callous treatment of the Mers was so well done in it's offhand "this is just the way it is" manner that it really made my spine tingle!  This book was a great start at fleshing out this future world.Now the bad.  I had a terrible time with the characters.  They just never made me care about them because they just seemed so shallow and two dimensional.  I got really tired of Mira "smirking" at people for one thing.  I also don't think it's necessary to spell out everything the characters are thinking and feeling.  Leave some of it unsaid, so the reader can use their imagination.I understand that publishing to an e-reader is different and maybe more complicated than regular publishing (?), but I really think it's important to make sure you are using words correctly in your work.  If one of your characters is "peeking" at something don't spell it "peaking".  "Revealing" shouldn't be spelled "reveling". Maybe just spellcheck errors?  I don't know but they were little things that distracted me from the storyline and decreased my enjoyment of it.All in all, I loved the story premise and plot and the possibilities they contained, but I was disappointed in the finished product.I received a free copy of this book in order to review it.