The Vicious Deep - Zoraida Cordova

For Tristan Hart, everything changes with one crashing wave.
He was gone for three days. Sucked out to sea in a tidal wave and spit back ashore at Coney Island with no memory of what happened. Now his dreams are haunted by a terrifying silver mermaid with razor-sharp teeth.

His best friend Layla is convinced something is wrong. But how can he explain he can sense emotion like never before? How can he explain he's heir to a kingdom he never knew existed? That he's suddenly a pawn in a battle as ancient as the gods.
Something happened to him in those three days. He was claimed by the sea...and now it wants him back.

You know what I've only read, like, 4 of in my whole life? Books about mermaids. Those Disney classic picture books about Ariel don't count, btw. And of the four books I read about mermaids, three were not for young adults, which is the genre I mostly write for.
1) The Mermaid Summer—I forget who this was by, I read it when I was maybe seven or eight years old (so almost 20 years ago). But it's about two kids, a brother and sister, who try to harness the power of a mermaid to save their fishing village and get a little more than they bargained for.
2) The Mermaid's Madness by Jim C. Hines—a high fantasy novel inspired by the Danish fairy tale, "The Little Mermaid," except the prince is evil, the mermaid is nuts, the Sea Witch isn't actually as bad as we think but she's still bad enough, and no one gets a happily ever except Cinderella's prince because his mother almost dies but doesn't, so yay.
3) Fortune's Fool by Mercedes Lackey—Katya, the female lead, isn't exactly a mermaid, but she's pretty close. She's one of the Sea Folk and seventh daughter of the Sea King. This novel is a combination of the fairytales "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," "The Little Mermaid," and "The Death of Koschei the Deathless."
4) Midnight Pearls by Debbie Viguie—an adaptation of "The Little Mermaid" where it focuses both on the little mermaid who becomes a human of her own volition and her merman brother, who was engaged to the mermaid princess who was turned into a human by the Sea Witch when she was little. So there are two couples in this book. It's a gooooood book.
Why is this relevant to anything? Because I'm about to review the fifth mermaid book I've ever read in my life and the only one where the main character is a dude (a mer-dude, to be specific). The Vicious Deep is the first book in a trilogy about Tristan, grandson of the Sea King, and it's astonishingly good, all things considered.

 

First of all, it's always refreshing to read a YA novel from a guy's point of view. There aren't many out there, after all. It's a nice change. Second, it's really nice that the "mean girl" thing hasn’t really pervaded male POV novels. "Mean boys" would be dumb. Not to mention incredibly violent, since boys tend to be more physical than girls when it comes to seeking revenge in some way.

 

Third, how original is it to have a merman as the main character? I can only think of maybe three things (counting this series) that have that—Disney's The Thirteenth Year, this series, and I think there's a trilogy about mermaids where the guy's a merman and the girl's a siren or something.
 

So why do I like The Vicious Deep? Well, there's the plot. Tristan reacts exactly the way you'd expect to finding out he's not entirely human. He freaks. It helps that he's got a friend his own age who is also a merman (Kurt is like, my abso-fave; he's adorkable and needs a girlfriend) who he can ask all those pesky "I just discovered I have fins" questions. My personal favorite question is actually a valid one, all things considered, and the author and characters handle it in a mature way (Tristan asks Kurt what happens to his genitals when he grows a tail; a valid question, since you never see anything beyond PG in movies or books with mermen, and they have to procreate somehow).
 
What I also like about Tristan is that he has flaws, but he feels bad about them. He tries to be honorable, though sometimes his teenage-boy-ness gets in the way. And he's responsible and brave; you see that when he's on duty as a beach lifeguard and he jumps into the water right as a big (apparently magical) storm hits in order to save someone he thinks is drowning.
 
I also love the mermaid politics. It's like, "Da frack is going on, exactly?" We've got a mermaid who helped Kurt win a race against the fiancé she really doesn’t seem to like and I think had him killed but then tried to frame Tristan for it, and that doesn’t get resolved before the end of book 1 so I'm curious where it's going. Then there are the other champions who are in line for the Sea Throne, who have magic and have been mermen waaaaaaaaaay longer than Tristan has. There's a pack of mer-noblegirls who follow Tristan to school from the court, too, though their motives remain unclear and smack of politics. It intrigues me a lot.
 
The thing that's really impressive about this book is how fleshed-out the story and characters are considering how short it is. It's actually a little too short for my taste (maybe 250 pages, less than an inch thick) and some things could have been fleshed out better, but considering the wordage she had to work with, I'm really impressed by the depth of the story.
 
Also a big plus—tropical landscapes for mermaid courts, dude. Whenever I think of the island where the merfolk held their little summit thing to decide who was in line for the throne, I always think of Wendy in Disney's animated Peter Pan sighing about, "A mermaid lagoon…ahhh, under a magic moon." Yes. Absolutely. That's what I got from that scene. It was beautiful. Almost made me want to go to where I might find a mermaid lagoon, except traveling is my enemy. Yesss…I only do it when absolutely necessary. Like for books.
 
And can I just say—a talking, living, mythical, ocean-faring ship in service to Tristan as the Sea King's grandson for the win. I love the ship. He's cool. A bit sad, seeing how he's basically cursed, but so cool.
 
Love the Sea King, too. He's so funny. He's like a grandpa most of the time, you can see how much he cares about Tristan, but we also get to see him be king, and that's cool. It's nice that in a book we get to see how royals deal with each other both privately and personally. That's something we don't see a lot of in many YA novels. A rare exception is The Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce (which sadly has its own flaws, but that's not one of them) and Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Series, though that's adult, not YA. So it's nice to see that sort of distinction made. Most people that I run into or talk to online don't seem to understand the line that has to be drawn between prince/king and son/father, for example.
 
There is one thing that seriously bothers me about this book, though. It's enough to knock down the rating from 4.25/5 stars to 3.5 because it's kind of a big thing. By the way, this problem involves a SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILERSPOILER! Okay, that should cover it.
 
So, here's my issue. A friend of Tristan's, this guy named Ryan, is Tristan's best friend. They have been best friends forever. The only person who's not family that Tristan loves more is his love interest, Layla (and can I say how refreshing it is for a GUY to fall for his chick best friend instead of the other way around?). So there's Ryan. And in a later battle in the first book, Ryan is killed. His body drops right in front of Tristan. The reason Ryan even died was partly because of Tristan; he didn’t do anything stupid, but he had to make some choices that resulted in Ryan dying. So Ryan is dead. Dead-dead-dead. Never coming back. And before the battle is even really over, Tristan knows this. His best friend is dead and he thinks it's his fault. That's the situation.
 
He doesn't really deal with this at all in the book. He handled his "I'm a fish-boy" freak-out very well and the author wrote it brilliantly; same goes for when Leila almost dies in another battle after getting stung by a highly toxic mutant puffer-fish. So it's not even a style choice. The author just basically glossed over it. Kurt's sister, who has a crush on Ryan, seems more devastated by his death than Tristan. Now, maybe Tristan handles his emotions in The Savage Blue (which is book 2) but as a reader, that totally threw me off. I was like, "Wait…what?" It just really hitched my rhythm. It's a big flaw for me.
 
So this book gets a 3.5/5 stars. I still want to own it, because the rest of it's great, but that one thing just bugs the crud out of me. So…yeah.

Seriously, though, go read it anyway.

LA Knight