Lies Beneath by Anne Greenwood Brown Review

Name: Lies Beneath
Author: Anne Greenwood Brown
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Release Date: June 12th, 2012
Format: E-Book ARC
Buy the book on Amazon
303 pages

Thank you Netgalley and Delacorte for sending me a copy of this book for review!

Calder White lives in the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior, the only brother in a family of murderous mermaids. To survive, Calder and his sisters prey on humans, killing them to absorb their energy. But this summer the underwater clan targets Jason Hancock out of pure revenge. They blame Hancock for their mother's death and have been waiting a long time for him to return to his family's homestead on the lake. Hancock has a fear of water, so to lure him in, Calder sets out to seduce Hancock's daughter, Lily. Easy enough—especially as Calder has lots of practice using his irresistable good looks and charm on ususpecting girls. Only this time Calder screws everything up: he falls for Lily—just as Lily starts to suspect that there's more to the monsters-in-the-lake legends than she ever imagined. And just as his sisters are losing patience with him.-Goodreads

My Review:
I really really wanted to like this book but it just wasn't working for me. Too much was going on and I just couldn't get into this book. No matter how hard I tried, I just wasn't invested in the plot or characters.

After reading some fantastic mermaid books recently, I decided to dive (lol) into Lies Beneath. When I first heard about this book, I was very excited that the main character was a male and it would be told from his point of view! I rarely read books with male leads, so I couldn't wait to see things from Calder's perspective. Unfortunately for me, I just couldn't get myself to really like Calder. I didn't dislike him, I just couldn't get myself to really enjoy reading his story. Another thing that I really bothered me about this book is that the mythology really wasn't explained! Some parts were SO vague and I found myself having trouble keeping up. I wish that we learned more about Calder's past and how being a mermaid/merman works in this book. I'm the type of person that needs a little bit of background knowledge in a book to be able to enjoy it and unfortunately this book just didn't have enough that made sense.

It wasn't that this book was written badly at all (in fact it was written beautifully!), the problem was that I just didn't find anything "special" to this book. Nothing really stood out to me, and I felt that this was kind of similar to other mermaid books that I have read. I knew that this book wasn't working when I found myself not thinking about what was going to happen next in the story, or staying up super late to finish Lies Beneath. This book just didn't have that spark.

This book had so much potential, but in the end it just didn't work for me. However, if you are looking for a mermaid book with a male perspective you might want to give this one a chance!

My Rating: Two out of Five Stars