Fathomless by Jackson Pearce

Celia Reynolds is the youngest in a set of triplets and the one with the least valuable power. Anne can see the future, and Jane can see the present, but all Celia can see is the past. And the past seems so insignificant -- until Celia meets Lo.

Lo doesn't know who she is. Or who she was. Once a human, she is now almost entirely a creature of the sea -- a nymph, an ocean girl, a mermaid -- all terms too pretty for the soulless monster she knows she's becoming. Lo clings to shreds of her former self, fighting to remember her past, even as she's tempted to embrace her dark immortality.

When a handsome boy named Jude falls off a pier and into the ocean, Celia and Lo work together to rescue him from the waves. The two form a friendship, but soon they find themselves competing for Jude's affection. Lo wants more than that, though. According to the ocean girls, there's only one way for Lo to earn back her humanity. She must persuade a mortal to love her . . . and steal his soul.

I think Jackson Pearce has really found her talent.  Like her previous books this is a fairy tale retelling that kinda-sorta links in with the others but also works really well as a stand-alone.  It also really shines in comparison to the other two.  The characters in this are really crisp and have real depth.  I loved the dichotomy in Lo/Naida as the same person and also as two separate people.  Celia is also a great character and I like how she is similar to but different than her triplet sisters.  The plot is heavily character driven and really focuses on the emotional turmoil of Lo, Naida, Celia, and Jude which makes you feel their pain and gives the book a depth that absorbs the reader into the story.  If I had to find a fault I would say that the ending seemed a bit abrupt unless you had read Sweetly and Sisters Red and for its switch to action as a plot driver instead of characters, but Pearce does a good job of making things flow as smoothly as possible.  In all I thought it was a shining addition to Pearce's fairytale series and absolutely worth reading.

Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale by Carolyn Turgeon

The story of two very different women, one mortal, one mermaid, and the clash between worlds best kept apart... It is a cold day at the end of the world when a young woman, a princess in hiding, looks out across a Northern sea and sees something she could not have seen. It looks...it can't be. It looks like a mermaid's tail. And, as she looks more closely, she sees that the mermaid is dragging a drowning sailor in her arms. Because, only hours before, another princess, the daughter of the sea queen, has decided to risk everything and take a look at the world above the sea: the world of mortals. And there she finds a storm, a shipwreck, a sailor, and sets in train events which will change both women's worlds forever.

This book was an excellent retelling of the original Little Mermaid legend. It made both the princesses even more realistic and choosing between them even more heartbreaking. The plot follows the original story very closely event-wise, but it freshens up the tale by totally throwing the character motivations out the window and giving them new backstories, lives, and reasons for action. Margrethe is a wonderful role-model as a girl, a leader who loves her country and her people and strives to bring better to them, especially when she realizes the truth about the wars, her father, and her chosen prince. Lenia is more of the mermaid stereotype, falling fast in love and having fewer motivations, but watching her grow and flesh out into a real person as she learns the advantages and pitfalls of human society is a real joy. As a reader I couldn’t put the book down, yet I was dreading the ending because, knowing the story, I knew that both girls couldn’t end up with the prince. My heart was breaking right up until the end (I won’t tell you what happened after that, you’ll have to read the book to find out!).