Oh wow.

This was a truly awful book for me. One of the worst I’ve read in awhile. Where do I even begin? The gorgeous cover drew me in and someone that I looked up to recommended this book as part of her reading list.

I think I might have totally missed the fact that this was mermaid/merman? erotica.

And this book is a reminder of why I need to stay away from “feminist” books featuring awful protagonists who spend the entire book telling us they are not depending on men and why they are staying single. YET. They are constantly having meaningless dates and hookups and sleeping around with random men they met on Tinder. And they aren’t even happy with their choices.

How is that empowering?

Let’s get to the main character

Lucy. She sucks.

Lucy is one of the most unlikable female protagonists I’ve ever read about in a long time. She is irresponsible, unhygienic, promiscuous, judgmental and disempowering.

The whole story was a long-winded, mindless, un-entertaining drivel about her inner thought process and her life – which were altogether uninspiring and boring. Why do authors like to write in this sort of diary-like style of the character’s inner thoughts? Save that for a more interesting character perhaps?

Lucy judges other women whilst her own life is a huge mess – within the first couple of pages she’s already judging some woman for what she’s wearing on a date. Whilst she is unable to even take care of herself and doesn’t have an iota of responsibility, dragging her feet on her thesis which I wished she’d just give up cos I doubt she was capable enough to finish it.

She is also so desperate for a relationship and sex that she frequently makes a fool of herself to her ex (whom I didn’t think she actually truly loved) and also messes about on dating apps, having one night stands which she clearly doesn’t enjoy and doesn’t fulfill her but still carries on doing it. Empowering NOT.

The disgusting sex scenes

Sex and erotic scenes can be painted very beautifully and capture the feelings of characters in the moment without having to be gross about it.

This book was chockful of very explicit, disgusting sexual scenes, described in very minute detail, pages and pages of it. It was as if Broder was determined to gross readers out with her descriptions. None of it was sexy.

I gave up reading when she had the first sexual encounter with the merman.

Reviewers on Goodreads mentioned other sex scenes that involved period sex and tampon removal etc. Ew. I’m just happy I didn’t get there!

Animal abuse

I’m not a pet owner though I love animals and I can’t imagine what dog lover or owner would be thinking reading this book. Lucy not only severely neglects her sister’s dog (usually for a man or for a sexual encounter), she ends up killing it by over-feeding the dog some tranquilisers, just so she could have sex with the merman in peace.

What even?

Overall rating: 0.5/5 Stars

0.5 points for the quite breezy writing, but would have binned it earlier if I could. This book also made me more wary of titles that are on National “lists” and have won many awards. Not every book that manages to do this is actually worth reading.