Tori Spring is a disaffected teenager: She can almost never finish a film in one sitting, she's smart but can't care about school anymore, and she dislikes her friends but is unwilling to forgo their company. This debut novel evokes a classic to present a girl searching for something true. There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character.
But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. Still, details delineating the kingdom of Thalassinia and Lily’s ability to move gracefully between sea and land are nicely inventive and well worth a plunge. Quince indulges in some troubling importunate antics (restraining Lily in the bathroom, waylaying her for a forceful kiss in the library), and Lily is drawn as a vacillating, stomping-around character in transition.
However, Lily’s annoying, motorcycle-riding next-door neighbor, Quince Fletcher (who can’t even swim), adores her quirkiness, and the novel becomes a rather predicable exercise in convincing the stubborn heroine who’s best for her. Now in line for succession to her father’s underwater throne on Thalassinia, Lily first has to “bond” with a life mate before her imminent 18th birthday, yet her unwavering choice, swim-team star Brody Bennett, doesn’t notice her.
At 17, Thalassinian mermaid Lily has been landlubbing for the last three years at Seaview High School on the Florida coast in an effort to feel more connected to her mother, a “terraped,” who died shortly after Lily’s birth. Imaginative sea-mythology elements help perk up the formulaic boy-crazy plot in Childs’s bubbly novel.
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