Reading with teafortiffany

Hello friends!!

I am back with another book review that I am quite literally starting to write after having finished the book. Waiting to stew in the world and think about what I just read? Absolutely not. Full speed ahead. Lets do this.

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“‘Get away from that window, woman!’ The shout echoed through the glass dome, anger vibrating in every word.”

Emma Hamm, Whispers of the Deep, First Line

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It’s been a while since I’ve read a good monster romance and this one has some good and some bad to go along with it. I have never really been that interested in mermaid type of books. I’m not a huge fan of the mermaid with red hair and I never could really get that image out of my head when it came to mermaids.

This is not that type of mermaid book.

First off, these are mermen. This is set in a world where humans have had no choice but to build their cities in the ocean with a few different cities. The mermen (called undine) are at war with these different human cities. For as long as many of these people can remember, the two races have battled against each other. That’s the setting in which we find ourselves following the two main characters; the human Mira and the undine Arges.

This book has dual POV, where we get to understand the thoughts of both the characters. I am very glad it has this because I honestly don’t know that the book would quite work with just the POV of Mira. Part of the whole premise of this is to understand both sides and about how they begin to understand each other. It’s done well and in a way that made it easy to understand whose POV we were currently reading from. There was a good distinction between the tones of each character and that was very helpful. The only way this could be improved would be with the name of the person whose POV we are experiencing at the beginning of the chapter, but I honestly didn’t find myself having any issues.

This is a slow burn and the characters don’t really act on anything until quite a ways into the book but it’s not one of those “so slow you want to pull your eyes out” type of slow burns (I can’t do those). I do really enjoy their story and how they get together. They’re both characters that I genuinely enjoyed reading.

We do get some relatively good worldbuilding in this book as well. We learn a bit more about undine and a bit more about the humans and the cities they’ve built. We also get an inkling of why they are fighting each other all the time. There are definitely some questions that have yet to be answered, but this is a series so it only makes sense that there is world building left to do.

With all of that said, there are some editing issues with this book. There were a couple of moments where there was missed capitalization at the beginning of a sentence. There were also a few sentences scattered throughout (maybe like 3 or 4) where the sentence didn’t quite make sense. I had to stop and read them again to try and sort out what it was saying. This is a self-published book, so I am not sure if the author has an editor or rounds of editing that it goes through.

This is a self-published book about merman and humans who live in underwater cities. The world-building and characters are fun and enjoyable to learn about. I genuinely loved this story. I was invested in the relationship between Arges and Mira. I wanted to know more about the world they lived in and the problems that exist between their races. I believe that this story is a 4 star story, however, because of the editorial errors I have to knock it down a half a star. I don’t normally do half stars, but I’m making an exception for this book because I genuinely don’t believe it’s a 3 star read. That means this book gets a 3.5/5!

Bye friends!!!