Chapter by Chapter

Jackson Pearce doesn’t seem to want to stop creating breathtaking re-tellings of fairy tales any time soon. As done with the first two novels in her Fairy Tale Re-tellings, Jackson Pearce managed to have me hanging over the edge of my seat and reading in anticipation of what must come next in her novel Fathomless. If you’ve read Sisters Red and Sweetly the other two novels in her series, then you know that there are werewolves and that they are usually trying to tear out the throats of pretty young girls. In her past two novels, Jackson Pearce has her characters fighting against the big bad wolves and has them as the main antagonists—constantly terrorizing the characters and giving romantic interests a reason to be manly men. In Fathomless you get a different type of story entirely and I personally loved it.Fathomless is the story of main character Lo, an “Ocean Girl”. If you’ve read Sweetly then you remember being told by a werewolf that twins are identical and in turn have identical souls and that if one is killed, the other twin only has half a soul. You also remember that the final twin has to have their heart bitten. If you’ve read Sweetly then I really hope you remembered that, it’s kind of crucial and if you haven’t not only is it explained in the book but you also read a (very rushed) description of how an Ocean Girl is created.Lo is related to a character in Sweetly and that’s all I can say without spoilers. However Lo has been living in the ocean and just like every other ocean girl, living in the ocean causes their memories of their pasts lives to slowly slip away to nothingness. So imagine having an insane case of amnesia. Lo believes that as time goes by (and as she grows more and more beautiful) that she will be taken away to become an angel and join the angels that sent her to the ocean to be an Ocean Girl. However, Lo isn’t willing to fade away and searches for a way to regain her soul by making a boy love her and by stealing it from him. So, throughout the story that is mainly Lo’s goal.The story switches to the POV of Celia, another main character and part of a set of triplets. Each sister can see either the past, present or future. Celia is stuck with what she finds the most useless ability she could possibly have—the past. But when Celia helps Lo save the life of a musician named Jude, Lo and Celia become allies and Celia helps her regain remnants of her past.When Celia and Lo come in contact, you immediately get a chapter from a different part of Lo. You get Naida Kelly (if you’ve read Sweetly I think you know whose sister this is) who is intent on getting her soul back. Naida and Celia quickly become friends and attempt to give Naida back both hope and her memory, but Naida and Lo are both the same person in the same body. I liked to think of it as a novel that gives us a taste of Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder, where Lo is two different people living in the same tortured mind.Fathomless is supposed to be a modern day Little Mermaid and I have to admit that when I think of the Little Mermaid I imagine that there would be a beautiful Ocean Girl singing to a boy and eventually falling in love. Don’t imagine that exactly because it’s wrong. Personally, I did expect that Lo would get some romance, maybe a romantic kiss from a boy right? Well wrong again, the novel mostly focuses on the romance going on with Celia and I felt like Lo wasn’t exactly “fighting” for a romance when she was more or less just sitting around saving herself instead of waiting for a prince charming with a perfectly good soul to snatch.All around, I love, love, loved Fathomless it was a novel that I personally found worth reading and because I’m already a huge Jackson Pearce fan I knew that I had nothing to lose. It was absolutely amazing with twists turns and a bit of psychopathy. The Ocean Girls are a brilliant new aspect to add to the series and the story is not stuffed with werewolves like the novels before it. Fathomless focuses on the hardships of being an Ocean Girl and eventually shows us what happens when the werewolves—I mean angels come back for the Ocean Girls they left behind.I would recommend Fathomless to past fans of Jackson Pearce’s novels as well as readers who are looking for an amazing YA series and are fans of the supernatural. Now don’t mind me as I pretend that I am Ariel from the Little Mermaid: “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah…”