Mermaids in Paradise By Lydia Millet

*Psst* Click the picture to find a copy

The phrase, “don’t judge a book by its cover” bit me on the ass with this one. I was looking for a summer read and saw this book with a cool mermaid illustration and an intriguing synopsis on the inside cover so I decided that even though it wasn’t out in paperback yet, I would pay the extra money to have a book while on vacation about warmer climates and the coolest of mythical beings.

I wish I had started with Part 2. I wish I had straight up skipped over the entire first 55 pages. If you want to read the book, then that’s what I recommend. The first part adds nothing to the story except for unnecessary character development. Basically, it was a sounding board for how awful marriage, weddings and the chauvinistic and materialistic traditions that go along with them tend to be. My thought the whole time was “why base your book on a honeymoon trip if you hate the idea of it so much?” The common law couple or the “just dating” couple (*raises hand in the air*) could have simply gone on vacation together and then all the unnecessary angst would have been written out of the story completely. I bought this book to escape to a land where mermaids exist and people try to help them, but oh wait someone gets murdered. I did not buy this book to read page after page of political moralizing.

Once the mermaids were found and the adventure began, the story wasn’t bad at all. I just got tired of the main character over-thinking everything. There are paragraphs dedicated to her fat jiggling while she rides on a golf cart and how that fat relates to the socioeconomic trends of our society. It was exhausting and not what I expected from the inside cover.

I just felt like this book was ruined by the author shoehorning her agenda for social justice into what was otherwise a fun story. I am all for activism and Equal Rights, but on my own terms – they don't need to be disguised as a fantasy novel. I felt like the jargon got in the way of the story just a tad too much.

Unfortunately, Mermaids only gets one owl.