Rating: ♥♥♥
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Release Date: July 4th 2011
Pages: 291
What It's About!
Fourteen-year-old Luce
has had a tough life, but she reaches the depths of despair when she is
assaulted and left on the cliffs outside of a grim, gray Alaskan fishing
village. She expects to die when she tumbles into the icy waves below,
but instead undergoes an astonishing transformation and becomes a
mermaid. A tribe of mermaids finds Luce and welcomes her in—all of them,
like her, lost girls who surrendered their humanity in the darkest
moments of their lives. Luce is thrilled with her new life until she
discovers the catch: the mermaids feel an uncontrollable desire to drown
seafarers, using their enchanted voices to lure ships into the rocks.
Luce possesses an extraordinary singing talent, which makes her
important to the tribe—she may even have a shot at becoming their queen.
However her struggle to retain her humanity puts her at odds with her
new friends. Will Luce be pressured into committing mass murder? The
first book in a trilogy, Lost Voices is a captivating and
wildly original tale about finding a voice, the healing power of
friendship, and the strength it takes to forgive.
Review
Lost
Voices was my first mermaid novel, and I'm not sure if it really opened
the door for me with the mermaid genre. The first few chapters were
really weird and disturbing. Girls who have been abused badly (or
sometimes not so badly) generally turn into a mermaid, and live out the
rest of their lives in the sea with other mermaids with dark human
pasts.
Luce is the main character in this novel. In the first
few chapters she becomes a mermaid because of the fact that her uncle
abused her and basically left her to die on a cliff. She's so miserable
she "melts" into a liquid, falls off the cliff, and gets rescued by a
mermaid queen who helps explain the fact that Luce is now a mermaid.
In
the novel's description, it says something about Luce being welcomed
into the mermaid tribe, but to me they weren't very welcoming at all.
Most of them were snobby and stuck up and the Queen mermaid kept
treating Luce like she should just know what being a mermaid is all
about. As the story went on, most of the other mermaids started being a
bit more nicer to Luce, but a few were still just plain mean. Especially
after a new mermaid joins their tribe and turns everyone against Luce,
including the Queen. I don't understand why Luce didn't just leave the
tribe since they were being such bitches.
One of the things that
bothered me, besides the beginning, was the baby mermaids, which they
call "larvae", that swim around close to the tribe, but the older
mermaids don't even try to look after them, other than Luce. I found it a
bit disturbing. The reason there are baby mermaids is from people
abusing their baby girls, making them change. Plus the fact that the
older mermaids treat them horribly and let them get eaten by orcas and
whatever else!
Other than a few bothersome points, the book in
generally was pretty good and is very nicely written. It was pretty half
and half for me though. Half of me really liked it but the other half
didn't really care for it. So it's more of a 2.5 instead of a whole 3
stars.
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