Lies Beneath

Coffee Beans: 2.5/5
Spoilers: Not really
Favorite Line: I hadn’t killed anyone all winter, and I have to say I felt pretty good about that. (pg 10, ebook), Maris chose her words like a surgeon chose a scalpel (pg 18, ebook), The sky darkened like ink spreading through a shirt pocket… (Pg 86, ebook)
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for this honest review

Okay – First, I felt this book had a lot of promise. The cover is suh-weet (although I was confused as to why the put a mermaid on the cover when it’s told from the point of view of Calder , a merman). The summary is dark and awesome. The first few chapters were more than I could have hoped for.

Which is why I was so show more confused by all the two and three star reviews on GoodReads (I didn’t read any of them, just looked at the ratings). I thought to myself, “Pft! These weirdoes don’t know a good book when they read one!” and proceeded on my merry reading way. I mean, a book with an opening line like this, had to be good, right? RIGHT?!?! I hadn’t killed anyone all winter, and I have to say I felt pretty good about that.”

WRONG.

What I liked:

I liked Brown’s take on the traditional mermaid myth where mermaids were bad and killed people (anyone else notice that YA books are turning more dark when it comes to fairy tales? I like it). The fact that they fed on the happiness of humans because they couldn’t produce their own. The fact that deep down, they were primal and instinctual beings.

The author does a great job of dropping tidbits of information relevant to the mythology behind the story as well as the mermaids’ motivation for what they’re doing. It flows so well and feels so natural. But at some points, I was thoroughly confused and wished she’d dropped a little more clues. Like the revenge they felt for their mother. Were they just really pissed, or was their drive more paranormal and instinctual? I’m leaning towards the latter of the two, but we’re never really given a good picture.

The writing, for the most part, was really great. Good descriptions and flow (…my stomach twisted like a snake in a jar, pg 30, ebook). Dialogue was natural and engaging. I liked Lily’s tattoo: No coward soul is mine but that’s beside the point. The story had so much potential to be a really good book.

What I didn’t like:

The book opens with Calder telling us he’s abstaining from taking human lives. But why? All we’re given is the reason of “because he wanted to see if he could.”

*Shrugs shoulders*

Yeah, okay. I guess that’s good. Enough. But I would’ve liked to be given a better reason than that. Something that actually had more significance to him, so that way when he’s tempted to kill Lily we know the battle he’s fighting and the strength it takes to resist. (But now that I think of it, there really wasn’t that much of a struggle for him. C’mon, dude. You haven’t eaten ANYTHING in over NINE MONTHS. It’s okay to be thinking your girlfriend looks a little tasty).

There also seemed to be a couple of scenes that weren’t important because they didn’t add to the plot what-so-ever and then were never mentioned again. And WEIRD things happened in them, and in the “real” world, the events would have been brought up and shunned. (I put “real” in quotes because in a REAL world, Calder’s fishtail of a rear end would’ve been kicked to the curb and would’ve been served with a restraining order by the biggest, baddest, meanest looking delivery person I could find).
For the most part, I got a really good, 3D sense of the characters, especially Maris. Calder, though, was a little ambiguous. I couldn’t help but get a generic feel for him. And therefore, generic, non-committed feelings for him. Good-looking guy. Strong. Smart. Funny. Possessive. Protective. (Anyone else seeing the clichéd cookie cutout “main guy” image so prevalent in today’s YA books?) I want something, SOMEONE real! I really thought I’d get it with Calder, but no dice.

And Lily…flat. And a 100% WEAK character. No, let me take that back. She’s far from weak. Loves her family, would sacrifice herself for him, thinks Calder’s muy estraño from the beginning. So she’s not weak, I guess. But the fact that Calder’s pretty much STALKING her, and she KNOWS IT, and she doesn’t follow her first impression that he CREEPS HER OUT, is pretty aggravating. So maybe she’s just a DUMB character?

I would have liked it so much more if she was put in a situation to be forced to partner with him against her better judgment in order to save the greater good instead of falling for him after he keeps pestering her. To me, it would’ve been a much more plausible evolution of a relationship.

I also think that part of the story being told from Lily’s POV would have been VERY beneficial for me as a reader. Then, at least, I’d have had some sense of reasoning behind her decision to go out with this complete creep that is Calder.

Girls (or anyone, really): If a boy is stalking you (showing up at your house in the middle of the night with lame reasons, ends up getting a job where you applied, is following you around), and you already have a bad feeling about him, please don’t perceive that as flattering. I’m so fed up with books that portray this kind of behavior as right or acceptable. There are real people out there who do these kinds of thing and are dangerous. The fact that authors are portraying this as something to be attracted to or desired is horrible.

*Steps off soap box. Dusts hands off*

There, I feel better.

I hate delivering BRs like this one. It hurts me to give my honest opinion because I know how much love, blood, tears, and pieces of ourselves an author puts into their books. They love it. Their agent and publisher love it. But it’s my job to give my honest opinion about what I read. And I DON’T love this book. I don’t even really LIKE it. I feel meh about it. I know there will always be people like me out there, but it doesn’t make this any easier. Ever.

Anyway, you may like it. Pick it up and read it, deciding for yourself. Me? I won’t be recommending it to anyone.

Happy reading, my friends! show less

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales.

Quick & Dirty: A mermaid falls in love with the daughter of a revenge target. Filled with a sweet romance, loving family, a not-so-caring family and a boy wishing for freedom.

Opening Sentence: I hadn’t killed anyone all winter, and I have to say I felt pretty good about that.

The Review:

Told from Calder’s point of view, this story explores the monsters lurking underneath the waves of Lake Superior. Calder tries to escape from his sisters – key word: tries. While his three sisters stick together around Lake Superior, Calder opts to vacation in the Bahamas during the winter, but every spring, Calder is pulled back to the lake and forced to spend an entire summer with his sisters. But this time show more it’s different. The sisters call him back earlier because they think they’ve finally found their mother’s killer’s son – Jason Hancock. Calder reluctantly returns from the sun to the cold waters of the lake. Determined to exact revenge on the man who killed their mother, Calder and his sisters plot to seduce one of Jason’s daughters – only, when the time comes, it’s Calder’s choice of which daughter is taken from him. Now the only way to get Jason into the water is though his oldest daughter – Lily. Try as he might, good looks and savvy flirting skills aren’t going to win over Lily – instead he might just end up falling.

I read this book while on the beach…while it was cold…and found myself looking for something that might just resemble a mermaid (although I did see several cute guys). Even though I didn’t find a lick of the paranormal, I did discover this amazing world of mermaids, revenge and family. I’m always welcome to guy narrators, but usually they are either completely boring or way too graphic. Calder’s voice was a perfect balance of the scramble of his thoughts and narration. As for the character himself, he was well developed and we could see his motives change as he begins to question his way of life (sucking all emotion from humans – that’s the way mermaids eat).

The girls in this book were amazing, even from the point of view of a guy. I found it ironic that Lily was the mysterious girl who catches the eye of the guy, and I was laughing when Calder tried to figure her out. After reading so many girl-narrated books, I found Lily quite easy to decipher, but with Calder, he was completely clueless on the matter. Just an ironic twist to the YA world. The sisters in their own right were each well developed, even for minor characters. Each one had their own motives for doing whatever they were doing, but they were all connected by the familial bond and the drive to kill. Complete sirens in themselves, but this book would not be nearly has interesting without them.

Overall, this was a great book. The twists in this book I did not see coming. There were things I was confused on, like how the sisters could blame Hancock for the mother being caught in a net, but hopefully it’ll dive into more detail in the next book. MAJORish cliffhanger at the end, but the next book Deep Betrayals comes out soon!

Notable Scene:

That was what had drawn Pavati to the old man the other day, and all three of my sisters to the college kids. That was what had drawn my mother to Lily’s own grandfather. I almost wanted to tell her the story. How he’d been so happy he was a magnet to her. How she capsized the boat and brought him down, but he fought back. How he regained the surface and pleaded with her. How she offered him the life of a merman, but he rejected her, so she demanded an exchange, another life for his. How he offered his son–only one at the time. How she swam him back to shore and waited by the dock.

How a second later the family was running for the car and racing out of town. How she followed the road along the shore. And then finally how she was strangled in a fisherman’s net.

What would Lily have thought if I’d laid it all out there like that? Would she have run away screaming, knowing that we were here to collect on that promise?

Lily wasn’t so obtuse that she couldn’t see something was bothering me. She leaned out of the kayak and draped her arm around my shoulder, laying her cheek against mine, comforting me without really knowing how wrong this was. I jerked away, not realizing I’d come close enough for her to touch me. A spark jumped through the air between her arm and my back.

I could choose not to kill Lily Hancock. That choice was still mine to make. I could protect her from my sisters. But there was one thing beyond my control. In the end, I would still deceive her. Jason Hancock was still marked for death.

FTC Advisory: Random House Children’s Books provided me with a copy of Lies Beneath. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review. show less

3.5 Stars!

Calder White is part of a murderous mermaid family. Calder is the youngest, and only male, of four siblings. Mermaids survive off the life force of humans. Mermaids can lie, but they can never break a promise and it’s a promise that brings the White clan to Lake Superior. Calder’s Mom was promised the son of Tom Hancock. But rather than honor that promise, Tom packed up his family and ran…which led to the death of Calder’s Mom. Now the siblings have found Tom’s grown son, Jason, and they plan to kill him and fulfill the promise Tom made all those years ago. It’s Calder’s job to get close to Jason’s daughter, Lily and ultimately lure Jason into the water where his sisters can even the score.

Never before have I show more disliked a main character so much right from the beginning. Calder makes no bones about the fact that he is a monster. He feels tremendous guilt toward his murderous tendencies, but he is a monster, pure and simple. I really wasn’t sure if this book was going to be for me, but the writing grabbed hold of me long enough to be able to see that Calder was a worthy character. I also enjoyed the male point of view…so many YA novels are told from a female pov so this was refreshing.

Being a merman, Calder oozes good looks and persuasive charm that Lily is able to resist, which bewilders Calder no end. It’s not until he drops the act that Lily, even remotely, starts to be intrigued by him. Lily puts up an amusing fight against Calder’s charms.

Calder, unlike his sisters, was made a merman, where his sisters were born mermaids. It’s through his short human life that I believe he is able to see what he does, and how monstrous merfolk are, without blinders. As much as I disliked Calder in the beginning, I did start rooting for him and my feelings toward him softened.

My only real complaint would be a lack of backstory on the Mer culture. Here was an opportunity for the writer to come up with some “mermaid rules for life”, and have fun with a subject there hasn’t had much written about (unlike vampires and werewolves), but she only gave us enough to get through the story.

I thought “Lies Beneath” was great as a stand-alone story. But I see it’s going to be a series. I’m not sure what more there is to experience with Calder and Lily, beyond my clichéd predictions...I was happy with everyone riding off into the sunset and letting the reader decide if and what the “happily ever after” was. That’s not to say I wouldn’t read a sequel, I’m just afraid it won’t be able to stand up to “Lies Beneath”. show less

I knew there was a reason I don’t like swimming in the Great Lakes. It has nothing to do with the temperature. It’s all about the murderous mermaids who live there!

I haven’t read any other books about mermaids. I know there are a whole bunch of novels out right now where mermaids play a large part, but I can’t say how this compares to them. What I can say is that this was both fresh and new to me, and I LIKED it. I will both be exploring more books about mermaids, and more books by this author. (Which is a good thing, seeing as this is the first in a trilogy.)

Calder, I fear, borders a little on the side of dangerous. I mean, obviously his character is dangerous. Murdering mermaid, eep. But… there’s also the whole show more he-doesn’t-want-his-girl-to-talk-to-anyone-else thing, the fact that he’s bad news for her (whether he wants to be or not), and he could murder this girl if ever he lusted over her emotions too much… I know there are a lot of women who go for that sort of man in their fiction (hello, Edward Cullen), but I have been over that for a while, so he really didn’t do anything for me.

That said, there was plenty of other enjoyable things about this novel. For example, I really enjoyed how the author has played with the family dynamics between Calder and his three sisters. At times you wonder if it’s love between them, but at other times it just seems so much darker than love. The manipulation and obsession between them is one of the best things that we are able to explore in this book… to see how far one would go to deprive the other of what they want most. It was rather fascinating.

Even though Calder didn’t do much for me, it was a nice change to read a book where the protagonist is a male. I do love me my kick-ass female leads, but every once in a while you need a change, and this was the perfect choice for that.

The Bottom Line
Highly enjoyed. I’m definitely looking forward to reading the rest of this trilogy. show less

Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown
ARC received by Delacorte Books for Young Readers via Netgalley
Reviewed by: Jennifer McCoy
The Sisters Say: Seductive, Sinister, and Spine-tingling

Where you ever afraid to go into the water when you were young? I know I was terrified—even of the deep end of the swimming pool where you could see all the way to the bottom. Was this just an irrational fear? Forget all your Ariel notions of mermaids and dive straight into your childhood phobia! After reading Anne Greenwood Brown’s Lies Beneath, you will never look at mermaids the same again.

I’ve seen quite a few mixed reviews about this book, comparing the plotline to Twilight but just with mermaids. I absolutely disagree! There was nothing in this show more book that screamed Edward to me. From Chapter 1, I was mesmerized by the idea of these monstrous mermaids. It was like stepping through the looking glass hoping to find a beautiful wonderland, but instead falling into a dark, ominous fantasy full of deadly creatures. I really enjoyed Brown’s macabre underwater world, in fact, I was in the middle of reading this when a tornado outbreak was starting to occur (I live in Tornado Alley), and instead of hiding in a safe room below the stairs, I stayed on the couch and read, determined to fight down any tornadoes that might impede my finishing the book! (I’m not crazy, promise.)

I really enjoyed the character development—even the evil characters. Calder White and his sisters are out for revenge on Jack Hancock, and even though Calder is one of the bad guys (or just in a Catch-22 situation), I felt myself rooting for him. He’s gorgeous, mysterious, arrogant, and dark—a wonderful combination in a young adult guy. And I love him even more as he starts to fall for Lily and we begin to see a different side of the monster.

Calder’s three sisters are perhaps my favorite characters. While you would think that mermaids would be similar (at least in some regards) to humans, but these three are truly inhuman, capable of the most treacherous evil. However, there is something about them that I found intriguing, and I can’t wait to see more of them in the next installment.

And then there’s the damsel in distress, Lily, who proves to be anything but “in distress.” She’s calculating and doesn’t fall for the gorgeous guy right away. It isn’t some “love at first sight” type of thing, which is a nice change of pace. We get to see Lily’s strengths and flaws, which makes her a great heroine.

With the enormous amounts of paranormal romance novels out there, it is nice to see something fresh and different. Brown takes the perfect fantasy world, the one where we all pretended we were Ariel on the side of the pool and would shoot up out of the water singing, “Part of Your World,” and she completely turns it upside down, adding hatred, revenge, murder, and deceit.

Dive into her world, and you won’t regret it! show less

This was another Netgalley book which I half expected to start and then decline. I fully expected to hate the main character-narrator, Calder White, being as he makes it clear from the beginning that as a mer he is a killer, a devourer of soul or spirit, leaving empty flesh husks hidden when he's finished.

Which is actually a little odd, because from the quick research I've done mermaids (sorry, Calder, merfolk) aren't known for eating people, per se. They are known for luring ships onto rocks to sink them, but the legends usually show them taking floundering sailors down to underwater kingdoms; I don't know if it's always been an assumption or not, but I always understood their role to be in the sating of … other appetites. I didn't show more see anything out there showing mermaids to be predatory toward humans – rather to the contrary.

Regardless, Brown's merfolk are predators in the grand tradition of vampires, using seduction and guile to lure those unsuspecting citizens off to their deaths, and Calder is not all that happy about it. Whether due to the circumstances of his childhood or because he has a more powerful imagination than many, he doesn't like being responsible for the deaths of vacationers out enjoying themselves on the water. Emotions are visible in a cloud around every human, and the ones glowing bright orange, the happy ones, are the ones who provide the most sustenance. He resists as long as possible, as much as possible … but it's like being a starving vegetarian at a Southern barbecue. There's not much choice.

Calder is called home (literally – by cell phone) by his sisters, who are determined to finally have the revenge they have sought for years, against the man they blame for the death of their mother. For years Jason Hancock has avoided Lake Superior, where it all began so long ago – but now he's back, bringing his family: a wife, usually wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis, and two daughters. The younger daughter is considered into the siblings' plans as bait – put her in danger, and the father will follow, and pay his debt; but Calder prefers to approach the older daughter, teenaged Lily. She's an ideal target for his seduction: she's different, that's clear from the beginning. She dresses differently, and loves poetry, and is filled with the vulnerability of a dreamer. She's perfect – as bait, as prey … and also for Calder to fall in love with. Which he does. Which rather complicates the plan: it's harder to be objective about someone who loves his disabled wife and whose daughter is someone whose hero you suddenly want to be. As he's already found, it's harder to kill someone you see as a person rather than "prey" or "target". His more bloodthirsty sisters will never forgive him if he ruins their revenge … and when they choose to be unforgiving it's a little harder to live with than in ordinary families.

I thought I'd hate Calder; I thought I'd hate the romance – I'm the one who said the romance in Twilight was a little like me falling for a gingerbread man. I was wrong: I liked both a lot. It's all very prettily done. It's a male point of view, unusual in books that fit into this pigeonhole, and it works. It's also a point of view with just enough matter-of-fact alienness to work; when he avoids sitting by the fire at a picnic, it isn't explicitly stated why – but it isn't because he's too warm. The moments in the book where he is in his natural element, and the glimpses of what it's like – flying through the water, weightless and cold, the odd comradeship with the shoals of fish, the wrecks at the bottom of Lake Superior – are wonderful; I wish there had been more of that, more of what it's like to function as a merman.

He's a good character, is Calder, torn between his duty and his newfound rebellious spirit. In some ways he's a thin read, still adolescent in spite of decades of life – but his strength shows itself in his ability to go without taking advantage of the appetizing orange-glowing humans all around him all summer long. His sisters can't figure that one out – even his favorite, generally nicer than the other two, doesn't understand it. Hungry? Eat. That's that. Those three are nicely differentiated from each other – maybe a little too different, physically; I don't believe there's ever an explanation of why the three have very different coloring and, apparently, original ethnicity. And Lily … Her character does not go tremendously deep, but under the circumstances it works: it is Calder's POV, after all, and whatever he feels for her, he doesn't know her very well. But, like him, she has several chances to prove herself, and does. She was not perfect, even in Calder's eyes, but she is well-written. Her relationship with her little sister is perfect – love-hate-aggravation-affection; the sister herself is well portrayed, which is a hallmark of good writing in my, er, book: badly written children irritate me no end.

I think that, in addition to being the first book of a series, Lies Beneath (which is a great title, by the way) is the first book I've read featuring mermaids. I'm impressed. I look forward to the rest of the series. show less

It took me a few weeks to finish this book. I wasn't able to connect with the characters the way I was hoping. The story line was great though.

I was confused when I first started reading because the main character is a male, and the cover shows a female. Even with that little aspect, the cover is gorgeous. Calder, the main character, and his sisters are mermaids. Don't expect any singing crustaceans because these aren't the Disney mermaids we are accustomed to. They are ruthless and murderous.

The relationships are odd. Calder and his sisters are pulled together every year. They can hear each others thoughts while under water. However, this only comes through when it's convenient. Calder is very stalker-like,and gave me the creeps most show more of the time. All of his actions seem forced. Nothing about him flowed with his character.

On to the story. I really enjoyed the author's writing style, and that's what kept me engaged. Her way with words helps move the story along. I definitely liked that the mermaids were sinister. It's nice reading a book where things aren't hunky dory. This book also shows that there are bad people otu there that are capable of having feelings and possibly redemption. show less