Lies Beneath

by Anne Greenwood Brown

[Ashley]

BookNook — Young Adult book reviews

This book is what you get when you mix mermaids with vampires. The idea of deadly, killer mermaids is awesome! It's a cool twist that I enjoyed. But I wish the author went further into the mermaid lore. Where do they come from? How do they live? What about the other families of mermaids? I think the little details like that could have been better developed.

The plot also felt a little slow at times. On more than one occasion I felt my mind wandering and I got a little impatient that the story was taking a while to develop. It wasn't always slow, but it had its moments.

One dimensional characters

Calder was a tough main character for me; I wasn't really a fan of him, and I just never fell for him. He always sounded so apathetic and indifferent. I suppose that's because the mermaids have no happy emotions until they feed off the positive energy of humans, and Calder was on like a 6 month spree of abstinence. Maybe that's why he was always so grumpy. But it also made him kind of a boring and depressing main character/love interest.

Lily was a little more interesting, but I was still never sold on her. I think I just didn't click with her. I wasn't sold on her addiction to poetry (just because I'm not a huge fan of it myself), and I thought it was a little unrealistic how she was immediately so suspicious of Calder. I mean, if I met a guy I wouldn't immediately think, "You're following me and you're a mermaid!" That's a little bit of an exaggeration of Lily's feelings, but whatever. :P And she seemed to take everything so well.. There weren't many high emotions; she constantly just had a calm acceptance.

A 'meh' romance

Yeah I wasn't sold on the romance. I mean, Calder stalked Lily. Literally. He did kind of have a reason: because he had to subtly get intel from her and get close to her so he could use her to kill her dad—whatever. But it was still creepy. He hid in bushes listening to her conversations, he slept outside her house, he got a job at her workplace, he bought books she read so he could memorize poetry and quote it back to her so he could pretend like he already knew it, etc.

And when the romance part did kick in and overtake the stalking-for-the-sake-of-a-mission, it was insta-love. One minute Lily is telling Calder that he's weird and makes her nervous, and the next she's in love with him. And same for Calder. There was very little buildup. Calder spent so much time stalking Lily and very little time actually talking to her. I felt like they maybe knew each other for two weeks, rather than the months that is required for real love.

Lacking suspense..

The big reveal to Lily was anti-climactic. Calder basically swam up one day and she was like, "So you're a mermaid? That's cool. I'll share my happiness with you." This brings me back to my point about Lily taking everything so well. There was a bit more intensity at the very, very end, but by that point, I just couldn't get excited.

Not terrible—just not for me..

This is one of those books that I don't think is bad, it just doesn't click with me. The writing was pretty good, and the plot was about what I expected, I just missed that connection to the story and the characters. I never really got invested and never forged relationships with anyone in the story. If you love mermaids and are looking for an interesting new spin on them, I would encourage you to give Lies Beneath a try, but it just wasn't for me.