Rating: WARTY!
This is based on the Little Mermaid, but it's more like a Disney-esque version than a Hans Christian Anderson version (which is nothing like Disney's take). I'm not a fan of Disney because they're not known for originality, and these days they're far too big and powerful. It looks like this novel isn't very original either - especially since it's based on a rip-off premise to begin with. And for the first in a series it's predictably padded.
This novel could have begun at chapter nine, which is a quarter of the way in, and lost nothing at all from deleting the first eight chapters. The ebook has all the chapters listed (Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc., and if you can fit your finger on the right one (good luck with that!) it will take you to that chapter, but tapping on that chapter header will not return you to the content page. For the life of me I cannot see why the hell a content list is included in ebooks. It's stupid and pointless, and just one more indication of how clueless and robotic publishers tend to be, with sadly few exceptions.
The story is also a rip-off of another Disney property - Marvel's X-Men. It's set in a future where genetic mutation has given some people abilities that make zero sense. Main character Aria's special power is that she can breathe underwater using gills that appear when she's immersed and disappear when she's dry. There's nothing in the human genome that could do this. While we share some curious traits with fish, we haven't actually been fish in a very long time, but this author would have us believe we're just a mutation away from returning to the sea!
Fine; I'll play along. So what has this YA author got for us? Well, a lot of predictability for one thing, and sub-standard writing for another, but I shall get to that later. Predictably, and exactly like in Marvel's X-Men, Aria is an 'aberration' and aberrations are predictably pariahs. In real life they would actually be celebrities, so this rang hollow. Predictably Aria has a hot guy, Alonzo, who is her best friend, although naturally she never sees him that way because he's an adopted 'brother'. Predictably, Aria wants more than her present life and dreams of joining one of the Mars colonies which ridiculously has also become a reality TV show for those on Earth. She predictably defies her father and signs up for inductee testing where predictably she's roomed with three vicious, lying, back-stabbing bullies. Yawn.
Predictably she meets a hot guy named Declan who's a bit of a bad boy and who is predictably in a position of power. Predictably she starts falling for him despite his betrayal of her, thereby setting up the predictable YA 'love' triangle. The tests she has to go through are stupid and worthy of a badly-written middle-grade novel, but Aria is chosen as a special snowflake because the testers are wise to her aberration. She's chosen - for no good reason - to go on a special mission to retrieve some data for them, otherwise Alonzo will be hurt somehow.
Here I have to give a minor spoiler. There is no Mars colony. At least not on Mars. It's on Earth and everyone has been fooled. This is profoundly stupid because people would know. At the very least there would be conspiracy theories about it, but here everyone is completely fooled! What, no one who worked to actually build the colony ever figured out what they were building? If the colonists actually built the colony, no one ever noticed that Martian gravity - which in reality would be less than 40% what it is on Earth - is exactly like Earth gravity? People would notice! The author makes no mention of gravity, even as she talks about faking the different positions of the stars and the smaller relative size of the sun from Mars. She would have been better-off choosing Venus which is equally unlivable, but if you can terraform Mars, then why not Venus? It's much more like Earth in terms of size, gravity, and so on.
So Aria's job is to break into the Mars colony and steal data that would allow her boss to prove the colony is fake? Seriously? None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Since they know where the colony is, all they needed to do was expose the location to bring the whole stupid façade tumbling down! But apparently only Aria can break-in because the route is underwater. They claim no one can use SCUBA equipment because it would be found, despite there being countless places to hide it. So instead of a specially-trained agent breaking in, Aria does it and she's hobbled by being morphed into a lookalike of one of the colony residents, despite this change hampering her mobility and losing her the ability to speak. All of this is done to conform to the fairytale, but none of it makes any sense whatsoever in the context of this story!
And who does she run into twice while on the mission? Only the guy she moons over from watching the colony reality show. I'm sorry but this is horseshit. It's thoughtlessly written, badly-written, and makes no sense overall. Badly written? Yeah. I read at one point, "and she gritted her teeth and pushed through" and then less than one screen later, I read, "She gritted her teeth as she pushed herself to her feet." There must be a lot of grit on those teeth. Hopefully she won't have to smile too much....
Aria's break-in takes place during a solar flare when the Mars satellites have to be shielded and no show is transmitted, so it's a quiet time on the colony: there's no filming, and she can sneak around. Since she's going in at night, it makes no difference because there's no filming at night so we're told! But here's what Aria says: "I thought only satellites around Mars had to go into shielded mode." She has this confirmed, but the author seems not to realize that Earth is nearer to the sun than Mars and therefore more at risk from solar flare damage, not less! If Mars satellites need to be shielded then Earth's satellites sure as hell do!
In being transported to the colony for her mission, Aria, who has this huge affinity for water, somehow fails to notice she's on a boat! There's this tunnel she has to swim through to get to the colony and we're told, "There aren't any cameras in the tunnel - for obvious reasons." What reason are those? Would one of them be so someone could swim into the easiest ingress into the facility undetected?! This is really bad writing. Yeah, they wouldn't transmit a TV show from cameras in underwater tunnels, but for security they would need them. And if they're maintenance tunnels why are they flooded?!
At another point I read, "Aria nodded, but her minds spun with terrible possibilities" Um, how many minds does Aria have? Is this another of her mutations? Or just a typo that wasn't caught? My theory? She has only one mind, but she makes up the others! LOL! A common YA author faux pas - meaning literally, a false step - is to say something like "He wanted to explore the areas of Mars that people had yet to step foot on." The phrase is actually 'set foot', not 'step foot' unless of course you're an evidently ill-educated YA author, in which case by all means step your foot in your mouth.
The author writes that for the colony, they had "genetically engineered some of the heartiest trees on Earth to thrive in the Martian environment." Heartiest really? I think she meant 'hardiest'. This is right up there with 'step foot' and 'staunch' when 'stanch' is meant. These are common, annoying and utterly predictable YA author screw-ups. I see them all the time. It's almost a hallmark of YA authorship.
The author seems not to know what a schematic is. I read that Aria had seen a "holographic schematic of the chip Declan had sent to help her identify it", but a picture of the chip isn't the same as a schematic, which is a circuit diagram! A schematic shows the wiring of the chip and it's hardly something that would help her identify it unless she saw inside the chip and was an engineer who was familiar enough with the technology to identify it from the schematic. Trust me, that's not Aria.
Another problem is when authors try to be too clever for their own good. This isn't a YA issue per se (not 'per say', which is another YA faux pas), but it is a sci-fi issue. The author has her characters on Mars referring to a day as a 'sol': "I haven't seen you in years, and now I've seen you twice in less than a sol." No one talks like that. Even Mars colonists, if there ever are any, will not talk like that, They will say 'day' since the Martian day, as the author points out correctly for once, is only about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day - The Martian year, on the other hand, is twice that of Earth, which is another reason the colonists and the viewers would know they were not on Mars.
There's no reason to use sol, just like there's no reason to refer to humans as 'Terans' as is done in every freaking stupid space travel story ever told. No one uses that word. Why would it suddenly become universal in the future? The planet is Earth, not Tera. It never has been called Tera. It's Earth and we're humans, Why would that change? And why oh, why would aliens call us Terans? It makes zero sense!
This novel doesn't make that mistake - at least as far as I read - but it does have people routinely swearing, yet using completely ridiculous cuss words - namely the names of the moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. No one will ever do that! It's never been done. Why would it? People have been saying 'fuck' and 'shit' for centuries. It won't change! Why are YA authors so stupid, and pathetic and squeamish about cuss words? I guess that says a lot about who these tepid stories are aimed at, huh?
Needless to say at this point, I lost patience and DNF'd this pile of crap. The truly sad thing is that the author apparently taught high school English for ten years. Ten frigging years! That makes me truly sad and actually glad she's no longer teaching. I condemn this novel for being yet another exemplar of all that's bad with story-telling, with the English language, and with YA novels.
