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celiaedf12's review
4.0
A lovely YA fantasy set in Hobart, about Undine's search for her father - which ends up being a search about herself, her history and the magic in her blood. Lovely and evocative, and some really beautiful character relationships, particularly the teenage ones.
enyamorwen's review
3.0
The writing was beautiful, the concept was great, but the obligatory YA love triangle was distracting and annoying. I probably would have given it 5 stars if Undine was 9 or 10 instead of 16 and there was no love triangle. There are plenty of better, less lazy, and more relatable ways to make some tension/fighting/etc. happen between characters, and there are plenty of more emotional and less shallow ways to strain and then reaffirm an important friendship.
I admit this is the first YA book I've read in a long time, and I'm not exactly the target audience anymore. But the whole "16 year old in a love triangle" thing seemed lazy, meaningless, and unrelatable. The rest of the book was great-- the atmosphere, imagery, word choice & writing style (very well-crafted and prettier than I expected), etc. But I really felt like this story belonged to someone younger. It was hard to even picture the characters as teens, which made the love triangle seem even more ridiculous and incongruous with the rest of the book. It's like someone took a perfectly good middle grade book and said "hmm, I want to sell this to teens, let's age up the characters and make them horny for no actual reason".
(Disclaimer: I haven't read the 2nd and 3rd Undine books, but I'm willing to bet the romance or whatever is completely unnecessary to the overall plot).
I admit this is the first YA book I've read in a long time, and I'm not exactly the target audience anymore. But the whole "16 year old in a love triangle" thing seemed lazy, meaningless, and unrelatable. The rest of the book was great-- the atmosphere, imagery, word choice & writing style (very well-crafted and prettier than I expected), etc. But I really felt like this story belonged to someone younger. It was hard to even picture the characters as teens, which made the love triangle seem even more ridiculous and incongruous with the rest of the book. It's like someone took a perfectly good middle grade book and said "hmm, I want to sell this to teens, let's age up the characters and make them horny for no actual reason".
(Disclaimer: I haven't read the 2nd and 3rd Undine books, but I'm willing to bet the romance or whatever is completely unnecessary to the overall plot).
wallymeadows's review
This book would have been so much better without the magic! I know the magic theme was intended as a metaphor for adolescent femininity and suchlike - but the book would have felt so much more solid and subtle without it! Language that had felt poetic and literary only paragraphs before became unwieldy and naive in the service of a plotline that was about on the level of an ad for the Mind Body Spirit festival. And I think the 'finding her estranged father whilst dealing with boy problems' narrative was meaty enough alone - in fact, severely weakened by the awkwardly handled addition of 'teenage girl discovers her inherent magical mysterious powers' plot.
Pretty well written; some very decently realised characters, all of whom could have been better utilised; all in all, not bad.
Pretty well written; some very decently realised characters, all of whom could have been better utilised; all in all, not bad.
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