“I’m gonna put the star rating at the end, so you can read this if you’re interested in finding out what I thought in star terms.
This is not the book for me. It very well may be the book for someone else, but it’s not for me.
It’s a silly book. The cover (and dumb controversy surrounding the cover, and dumb people tweeting mean shit to Chelsea Cain) would probably lead you to believe that it’s a very serious book. But…look, mer-corgis play a role. That means a mermaid where the top half is a corgi, bottom half is a fish. These come out of nowhere, totally unexplained, and nobody in the story says, “Um, what the fuck?”
I like some silly shit. This is just not my particular flavor of silly shit. It might be yours, and that’s cool. I think it’s tough to be objectively wrong when it comes to liking something silly.
It’s pretty tough to write silly shit that a few people like, and I think it’s REALLY tough to write silly shit that a lot of people like. Everyone’s got a different threshold and interest level in silliness. It’s gotta be one of the more specific, narrow targets to hit. This is probably why people in good relationships are often silly with each other in ways they aren’t normally. Goofy voices, inside jokes, all the crap that a person might hate normally, you’ll sometimes see it come out in their close relationships. And I think a big part of this is that A) people feel comfortable being silly with people they know and B) people find themselves attracted to people who share an idea of silliness.
Is silliness the ultimate in intimacy? Probably not. We’ve still got lots of butt stuff we can do. But silliness is totally up there.
Anyway, this book is like a 2-star for me. If I went out on a date with this book, I’d be feeling like it was nice and all, but I don’t think I’d feel like we were ever going to get to the level of total silliness together. We just didn’t connect like that.”