Errata: "she was pretty with her long trusses of wavy auburn hair" - I think the author meant 'tresses'! Trusses would be rather weird. He also had post-pone at one point but I don't know if it was written that way with the hyphen, or if it was an artifact of the word processor or the ebook conversion process.
I'm not sure why I began reading this story. It's not very long, but even so, I made it only halfway through before giving up in disgust and in resentment at the time I'd wasted on it. The biggest problem with it was that literally nothing happened in it. I thought that the main character, Marei, would find out she's a mermaid, and maybe she did, but not on the first half of the novel where she found out nothing, did nothing, learned nothing, changed not so much as a millimeter and was one of the most boring characters I've ever read about. Marei isn't very smart and has no imagination, which is hardly surprising since there seems to be zero schooling on the island.
The premise is stupid. Apparently a very limited number of people live on the island and the mayor - a man who lives alone, decides who gets to pair off with who. Why? I don't know. The story is that no one can get pregnant on the island and they have to go off to another tiny island to get pregnant. Why? Who the hell knows? The author isn't telling and no one on the island finds this even remotely strange. The fact is that the reader doesn't know squat about this community because there is zero world-building and not a single person on the island, not even the younger ones, have an iota of curiosity about their life, why they are there, why they have so little freedom, what's elsewhere, off the island, or anything!
At a certain age, they're supposed to note down on a scrap of paper the name of the person they want to 'bind' with, but options are severely limited and the mayor makes the final decision. Everyone is apparently fine with this ridiculous arrangement. Marei encounters a mermaid one day, and isn't even remotely surprised despite mermaids supposedly being extinct. She has no curiosity about this alien being, and the mermaid is one of the most petulant characters worthy of the Tinker Bell Award. There is only the one encounter with this mermaid - at least in what I could stand to read and we learn nothing from it. There are occasional ships that pass the island, but which never interact with it. Why? Who knows. The reader certainly doesn't because the author tells us squat and no one ever questions anything.
The whole story was nonsensical and a waste of my time.
