Fathomless (Fairytale Retellings, #3)

Fathomless
Jackson Pearce
291 pages
Release date: September 4, 2012
Publisher: Little, Brown
Source: Southern ARC Tours
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Celia and her triplet sisters have a certain ability between the three of them to tell the past, present, and future of those they touch.  While her sisters can use their powers to see the present and future to their advantage, Celia doesn't feel like her gift to see the past is all that useful. That is until she meets Lo, a girl who lives in the ocean who used to be a girl who lived on the land named Naida.  Lo doesn't want to forget what it was like to be Naida, and with Celia's help she begins to see her forgotten past more clearly.  They work together to save Jude, a handsome local boy, when he falls into the ocean and soon they are competing for his love, for very different reasons...

This is not your Disney movie retelling of The Little Mermaid.  There are no friendly crab and fish sidekicks in this retelling, which gets decidedly darker as the novel goes on.  I loved the way Celia, Jude, and Lo's lives became instantly intertwined in that one moment.  This created a delicious plot that at times was more devious than innocent.

I really enjoyed the alternating points of view in this novel.  I feel like I really got to know Celia and Lo/Naida.  I really felt for Celia.  I'm a twin and I know what it's like to grow and to not have your own identity - you're always thought of as a group.  So I knew where Celia was coming from, wanting to do things apart from her sister and have her own friends.  But it was Lo/Naida's character that really had me invested in the story - it was like two characters in one person and they kept dueling with each other to see who would be the more dominant one.  It was a little bit of a split personality type of thing, and that was extremely interesting to read about, particularly as the novel reached its climax and it was clear only one could win.

All of Jackson Pearce's fairy tale retellings are extremely enjoyable and I highly recommend them all.  They all have a delightful cast of characters and brilliantly thought-up plots that take the fairy tales you knew as a child and upgrade them into charming YA novels.  I really hope Pearce continues on with the series, I would love to read more.