Deep Blue by Jennifer DonnellyMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
Rated PG.
Do you see that really short list of bookshelves/tags? That's short for me, and that usually means bad things. It's especially bad when I say "the series is not getting better" for the VERY FIRST BOOK IN THE SERIES.
This book is living proof that a beautiful cover does not a great book make. Actually, the cover was the ONLY reason I kept reading this book. I kept thinking, "I just read a book with a very similar cover (Of Poseidon), and I loved it! It has to be related!"
Wrong. That is a major logical fallacy, and I know it and you know it and everyone knows it. It just took 264 pages before I couldn't take Deep Blue anymore.
So what went so wrong? What on earth went so wrong? Let's list the reasons:
1. Clichés.
Oh, how I hate clichés. And Deep Blue has SO MANY. Girl feels rejected by her mother. Girl hates the idea of totally antiquated arranged marriages (I mean, that is SO 1200 years ago!). Girl falls in love with the boy she is arranged to marry. Girl is supposedly dumped by said boy and is told by her friends that she is "too good" for him anyway. Prince turns out to be a total loser and player. Girl who has unbeatable Sistahood of awesomeness, complete with slang and rebelliousness.
And who can forget the epic quest of five superhero teenagers, all brought together by some mysterious prophecy that will lead them to save the world? Also, the transmitters of said prophecy are reputed to be scary bedtime stories. Nearly all five of the separate super-awesome girls has to overcome doubts about the reality of their hoodoo dreams. And the bad guys are destroying the environment, kill the heroine's parents, and kidnap entire villages of merfolk with very little reason whatsoever! What can get awfuller than that?
2. Made-up lingo.
How much made-up lingo and sea-related puns am I expected to endure? Zee-zee, bing-bangs, chillawonda, kanjaywoohoo, caramalgae, currensea, etc. Admittedly, that last one is pretty funny. But too many convoluted, made-up words tend to get a little annoying and distract from the overall story. A few can create setting. Too many (or maybe it’s too many syllables), and I start to get bored.
3. Pretension.
By that, I mean that the story is intended to sound smarter than it is because of Latin. Really, Latin would be fine, except it's not used for anything of substance. It's just as vacuous as everything else. Also, there is Portuguese and the like. I mean, it's cool to have multiple languages used in a YA book, but please don't insult my intelligence with this weird combination of Portuguese, Romanian, Latin, English, and sea slang.
In the prologue—not even at Chapter 1, but the Prologue—we get a massive stage-setting with the Romanian river witch singing English verse, then saying a whole lot of things in Romanian. Again, it’s cool, but it’s a rather interesting way to open the book. I guess it works, but something about it was just a bit off-putting. (Really, are they switching languages constantly, or are they only talking/singing in Romanian and Donnelly is just haphazardly translating?)
I have actually found that a lot of books that use Latin or other languages use them subtly. You know—fantasy books like that tend to use it without drawing attention to it. However, Jennifer Donnelly waves a giant neon flag all over, saying, “LOOK! I’M USING LATIN! LOOK AT ME!” On page 28, one of the characters says, “Why? Quia Merrow decrevit! That’s Latin. It means ‘Because Merrow decreed it.’” And in the next line, she says, “Dokimí is Greek for trial, and a trial it is.” The next page, we get a baronessa telling us that the Latin cantare is the root word for chant, enchantment, canto and incantation.
We get Latin and Greek in just a few lines, and neither one is, in my opinion, warranted. Especially if we need infodump to learn what the languages are, much less what they mean. But (and note this), we do NOT get an explanation as to why mermaids actually use all these human languages. They don’t have their own language; they have a haphazard amalgamation of various ancient human language. Evidently, though, there is no explanation needed for this.
4. Bad poetry. I am not a huge fan of poetry in novels because poetry is usually not within the skill set of the author.
Ack. That sounded really, really harsh.
But please! If you decide to write a prophecy in verse, hold to some modicum of consistency! On page 4, we read the prophetic verse of five stanzas. The rhyme scheme is AABB CCDD EFGF HIJI KLML. It totally SWITCHES halfway through the poem! I don't care if the first two stanzas are about uniting Adventure Pals and the others are about siccing said Adventure Pals on the bad guy before disaster! IT'S STILL PART OF THE SAME POEM.
Oh, and that's not even touching on the issues of meter! I did not take an entire semester of Shakespeare and another semester of literary criticism to let that go to waste. The stresses are so inconsistent.
5. Inconsistencies. Major, irredeemable inconsistencies.
Every so often, I felt that Donnelly and her editor forgot that the story takes place under water. This is especially evident when the heroine has to take a bath and then when she and her girl squad get underwater makeovers. They. Are. Under. Water. That means that when you get dirty, the current usually tends to wash you off. Right?
To be fair, the heroine’s fin doesn’t stop bleeding when she is injured. That’s fairly realistic. (Then again, wouldn’t merfolk have some sort of quicker blood coagulation to compensate for the water?)
But the other stuff—really. The heroine escapes at high speed from a bad situation, and when she is rescued, she is given a room. And the first thing she does is take a breath of relief and…wash off. Yup. She washes off all that grime. But wait; wouldn’t the water she was swimming through have washed off grime and gunk and blood and whatever? I mean, she wasn’t burrowing in silt on the sea floor. I guess that’s something I don’t have to care about.
But then—holy kanjaywoohoo. The heroine and her girl squad get underwater makeovers for disguises. Hair dye, makeup, new clothes, the works. The heroine gets her hair dyed black with squid ink, and her hair is cut to frame her face. Realistically, when applied underwater, that ink would get a lot of places in addition to her hair, and her hair would, presumably, float around her face instead of framing her cheekbones. Then she gets black squid ink squirted on her lips and on her eyes for lipstick and eyeliner/mascara, with “a silvery dusting of ground abalone shell” for her cheeks. Again, the squid ink would get in her eyes and on her face and on her pretty clothes and EVERYWHERE, or it would just wash off, and the abalone shell would, again, wash off, assuming you could even miraculously put it on while in the water. Another girl bleaches her hair blonde. Um. Isn’t bleach kind of poisonous? Do you mean to tell me that merfolk are using bleach for cosmetics underwater, that is, in the same water they breathe? And so on and so forth. It is just not logically feasible.
I like mermaid stories, but if you’re going to write a mermaid story, you have to put some effort into remembering that everything has to be done underwater. Go swimming for an hour or two, try to do ANYTHING with your hair—including a ponytail—and then experiment with underwater makeup while the lifeguards aren’t looking. Also try on a dress or new clothes underwater and figure out the drapery issues. Go ahead. I dare you. Test those underwater logistics.
These are just my biggest beefs with Deep Blue. I know it’s not completely Donnelly’s fault—her editor really did not do her job right—but there are a lot of things that make this story unpolished. But it doesn’t have to be great literature to be a decent read. I mean, I just finished reading Of Poseidon and The Iron Fey series. And they were fun. Yes, they were almost embarrassingly hormonal and had quite a lot of drama, but they were relatively well executed. I liked the characters (for the most part), and the stories were intriguing, and the settings were fascinating, and they were just good yarns with a couple of halfway decent themes swirled around in there. Deep Blue, on the other hand, was just a mess.
To conclude, here is my tribute to Deep Blue:
"To sea or not to sea, that is the question:
Whether 'tis merlier in the fins to suffer
The zee zees and bing-bangs of invincible Fortuna
Or to pit songspells against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dry, to weep
No more. And Quia Merrow decrevit!
These kanjaywoohoos are so good!"
View all my reviews
