Fins Are Forever by Tera Lynn Childs

I'm not sure how I feel about Fins Are Forever by Tera Lynn Childs. On the one hand I love the continuation of the story from the first book, I love the character Quince and I love the Lily is learning more and more how to be herself. On the other hand, I felt that new  characters were added just to add meat to the very thin story, I thought that the story was predictable to the point of boredom and, well, there's a whole lot of Dosinia and Doe (as she is called) is the character we spent the whole entire first book disliking--frankly, I disliked her soooo much that, even at the end of this book and we find out a few things about her, I still wanted her to get eaten by a shark.

Although the bond has been severed, at the end of the first book, Lily and Quince decided that they should be together. This means that Lily must give up her kingdom...for a boy. I was willing to accept this fate for Lily as she spent the whole book crying and not listening to her heart and needed to be shown that her true happiness really does matter. In this book she jeopardizes (although by the end we all see why) her future and her happiness, and I still can't decide if it's because she was too stubborn to get it or if Doe is a bigger b-word than I thought.

Which brings me to the fact that I don't like Doe. I suppose that I should be grateful that Childs has written her character so well that I want to vomit every time she's around, which in this book is often, as she's been banished from the kingdom and forced to live with humans. Of course, Brody is back and there's another boy who is heir to a throne in dire straits. Because of this fact, there's more relationship tension between Quince and Lily...tension caused by Lily and her inability to trust people...ugh.

Part of the problem I may have with this book is that I felt that the first one ended so nicely. Actually, this book has a pretty sweetastic ending also, it just took me about 45 pages to understand that there could, in fact, be more to the story.

It may not sound like I enjoyed this book, I did like it, I just know I would have liked it more had it been a stand alone and not a sequel.

3 Stars
 

I'm looking forward to the third book, Just For Fins, and I still love myself some Tera Lynn Childs, however, this particular book didn't totally live up to my expectations. 

Teacher Advisories 

Sex 1/5

There's some kissing...um, that's all, probably like three kisses total.

Language 1/5

The only reason why I say 1 is because my mother always says that people know what you are saying when you replace a cuss word with another word. Childs is excellent at using sea-words for cuss words. I love it, some may not.

Substance Abuses 0/5

Unless you count chlorine, which is toxic to mermaids.

Violence 1/5

There are some intense arguments used with harsh language.


Touchy Subjects

Family
What happens when a family member you hate has to move in with you?

Love
What is love? Does it mean that you have to give up being yourself and your goals to be with someone? How old do you have to be to know you have met 'the one'?

How this book is used in the classroom

1] Independent Read option
2] There's an excellent character project that Childs uses to flesh out her characters. It can be found at Books, Boys, Buzz