Publisher Description
For Kate Sweeting, love isn't in the air. It's in the water.
Since her father died, Kate Sweeting’s home life has been in the pits, her well-being on life support. Her future looks desolate until she and her mother, Cara, make another plan: abandon their shriveled existence for more promising prospects on the coast, where Cara can play small-town librarian-bachelorette and Kate can figure out what’s up with that secretive Blake family from the beach.
Everyone is eerily captivated with Kate and her mother, and Cara is the first to figure out why when the man of her dreams arrives all dripping and devoted and closed-mouthed about what he intends. Kate is willing to go along with their subterfuge for a while, but eventually makes a charge for the water to learn what her mother is hiding. Gabe Blake is there waiting for her…and so is someone considerably less friendly. By the time Kate navigates her way home, everything will have changed for her—what she feels, what she wants, and what she’ll risk to be with the man she loves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stevens adds psychological manipulation to the seductive powers of mermaids in her rambling romance full of delayed and competing desires. Recently widowed Cara Sweeting and her six-year-old daughter, Kate, relocate to coastal North Carolina. They quickly become friends with the sprawling and mysterious Blake clan, later revealed to be sirens capable of shifting between piscine and human forms. Despite the families' strong attachments, the parents disrupt a budding romance between Kate and Gabe Blake, offering only murky promises of later explanations and heavy pressure to achieve academically. The confusing early chapters drag through Kate's childhood in an oddly nonchronological sweep and pit Cara's calm but rich personal life against her sister Dana's sterile workaholism as the two paths Kate might pursue. Things improve once Kate and Gabe reunite in early adulthood to consummate their long-postponed romance. Gabe teaches Kate about the strict customs of sirens and their powerful abilities to read and influence others' emotional states. Patient readers are rewarded with the final dramatic arc of a gaslighting siren king who kidnaps Kate, but most will find the plodding work taxing. (BookLife)
