Book #26: The Forbidden Sea (Whitney Book #8)

Title: Forbidden Sea
Author: Sheila Nielson

Last year when I read for the Whitney Awards, I felt like a curmudgeon-- all of my prejudices come out, and I worried that people will think I'm unfair or unkind as a reviewer. This year, with graduate school added to my plate, I feel even more like a crank-- I'm too busy to be nice. If I were in a less stressed out frame of mind, I wonder if I would have liked Forbidden Sea more, but when I feel like I don't have enough time to devote to each story, I want to get caught up in the story right away. Forbidden Sea started out promisingly enough-- Adrianne rescues her sister from drowning and gets scratched by a mermaid in the process. But then, for the next 200 pages, not much happens. Adrianne worries about her family, she pines over the neighbor boy, she feels embarrassed by her scratch, and she hears the mermaid calling for her. I kept putting this book down, reading something else, and coming back to it, all the time wondering when she'd finally go see the dang mermaid. Finally, in the last 50-60 pages, she does go under the water, and the mermaid guides her to the sea prince that she's destined to marry. That part starts out interestingly enough, but then parts of it start to feel really didactic. For pages and pages Adrianne worries about what she should do, what her responsibilities to her family should be, and whether she should stay in this rich and idyllic land under the sea or return to the difficulties and uncertainties of life on land. I won't tell you what happens in the end, but it shouldn't be too hard to guess what happens. I feel like this book had a lot of promise, and Nielson creates the scenes both on land and under the sea with great details. I even feel like Adrianne is an interesting and complicated character, but the arc of the story didn't work for me.