Chapter by Chapter

Loved it! Love! Love! Loved it! Everything about The Vicious Deep took hold of my heart and my emotions and throughout the novel it never let go. Lucky for all of us readers, each “part” of the novel starts with a fancy and deep quote and tosses us into the awesome storyline. The novel itself starts at a fast pace as our main character Tristan is swallowed whole by an ocean wave and is swept off into the sea. Because of this, we also get introduced to the Silver Mermaid and to Layla: Tristan’s best friend and his soon to be crush.I have to admit that it took a while to get to the mermaid-goodness of the story and while the story introduced us to Tristan’s life and to his jerky past… when we do get to see/read about the mermaids it all happens in a hilarious scene where we meet Kurt and Thalia, learn that Tristan’s mother was keeping a ton of secrets from Tristan and even watch Tristan panic as he grows his…erm… tail? Or is it fins? Either way, from that point on in the novel, everything about the story was just amazing.When we got to go to the mermaid kingdom, my childhood totally kicked in and had me imagining the little mermaid kingdom and all of its citizens. Except, that like the novel states: “These are not the mermaids you know” … and that’s totally true! If you were expecting to see a little red-headed mermaid who wants to walk on land, you are going to be in for a shock when there are mermaids who attract every man around them, use magic, and there’s the occasional abomination mermaid that I can’t go into much detail on because they scare the living daylights out of me.As I reached the mid-way point (or at least around there), I didn’t think that the story could get any better. That is, up until Tristan is forced to compete in a challenge to become the Sea King, by finding an Oracle (Greek mythology anyone?) who has a piece of the Triton and the first three Champions to find the three Triton pieces have to battle it out at some point in time. Come on! How awesome does that sound?The ending of the story not only took away my breath, but left me hanging and wondering what happens next. I would recommend this to fans of Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales series as well as fans of fantasy and Greek mythology and sparkly mermaid tails.