Title: Las Sirenas
Author: Bell Ellis
Length: 44 pdf pages
Publisher: Dreamspinner
Genre: m/m fantasy paranormal, Bittersweet
Rating: C-
Blurb: Andrew’s lived all his nineteen years on the Pacific coast, working odd jobs and spending his free time in and on the water. Maybe he’s drifting through life, but it’s been enough, until the day a sudden surge knocks him off his friends’ boat and something—or someone—tosses him back. Now Andrew spends all his free time searching the water for a dream, and to keep it, he’s willing to give up everything.
A Bittersweet Dreams title: It’s an unfortunate truth: love doesn’t always conquer all. Regardless of its strength, sometimes fate intervenes, tragedy strikes, or forces conspire against it. These stories of romance do not offer a traditional happy ending, but the strong and enduring love will still touch your heart and maybe move you to tears.
Review: *Review contains spoilers*
Before I get started, I’d just like to say Beware. No, not because this is a Bittersweet story.. Well, maybe. But more likely because I thought the ending of this story sucked SO BAD that I actually groaned aloud a WTF? to the computer. But well, I’ll get to that in a little bit.
Andrew wastes his days away cleaning up in a little bar on the beach in California. He has to be close to the sea, just like his deadbeat father who drifts through town every now and then with his surfing friends. He’s pretty much been ignored and alone most of his life. There is little detail, but this isolation from just about everyone leads to him believing that he really isn’t good for anything. His only friends are Shane and John, two of the same ilk, in love with the sea and each other. They’re a steady pair that Andrew admires, yet with a solid head on their shoulders and a ready piece of life’s wisdom to part with.
One day, as the story opens, the three are sailing and a wave casts Andrew overboard. When he hits his head and is promptly thrown back into the boat, all while unconscious, all three find it bizarre that the ocean would seem to have tossed him back. Andrew, however, remembers a shocking pair of blue eyes just before he went unconscious and is drawn to the sea even more. He searches for answers from the sea and from himself and his surroundings, which continue to seem hopeless in his eyes.
Andrew is a bit of a hopeless piece of flotsam just drifting along with the other trash dumped in the ocean. That’s often how he describes himself. I couldn’t tell while reading the story whether he was truly in hopeless despair or if he was just in that period of life where he feels as if he’s untethered from the world and is looking for anything to anchor him, to show him a way to move forward in life. I suppose that is why this ending bothered me. I honestly didn’t see it coming; it seems incongruous to the rest of the story. It seemed to me as if the story was written to fit the Bittersweet line at DSP. As if, other than the ending being the natural conclusion, it was instead written in order to be bittersweet. It just didn’t fit, and the fact that the wasn’t ended in another way seemed like a lost opportunity to me.
The whole story up until the ending is really about two people who live in different worlds. The bird can fall in love with the fish, but he can’t live underwater, nor can the fish fly with the bird. The premise is naturally bittersweet because there’s no possible future. They’re star-crossed lovers. They can’t understand each other, naturally living in different worlds, yet there is just a bit of a romance. That was one of the two things that I felt were pretty heavily borrowed from other works. Obviously there is carte blanche in manipulating Shakespeare, or borrowing themes. However, I was a little disappointed the first time Andrew puts his head underwater and hears the Merpeople’s song. Harry Potter, anyone?
There were still things that I enjoyed about this story. It is well written, even though I had several problems with the plot. There is a lot of good descriptive prose laced throughout the story. Everything described by Andrew is seen through a filter of the sea, as if he is a creature of the sea himself and it is all he understands. Shane and John are great characters. They have wonderful voices which in dialogue immediately helped me understand who they were. I’d love a story about them.
I’m sure that this is a polarizing story. I can see some readers enjoying this. Much of it is just not to my personal taste. What I saw as a story heading towards redemption and then was completely opposite, another may feel differently about. I usually try to rate stories as objectively as possible, but I admit this one is purely subjective. The story left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth and thinking about it still makes me a bit angry. C-
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Title: The Storyteller
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