TL;DR Romeo and Juliet-ish but with mermaids and selkies
(finished 8/8/15)
EDIT 9/20: I forgot to add that I got this book for free through Bookbub.
The good news is, Promises gave me everything I wanted and didn't get out of Just Breathe. Except a smart main character, but hey, the plot's gotta start somewhere.
In all honesty, I kind of wished that the plot of Promises had taken a different route, that Eviana would've gotten caught trying to run away with her lover the night before her arranged marriage. I feel like that would've made a really interesting story, especially considering the compromise her fiance Kain offered. But nope. She succeeded in running away.
And also in making everyone's lives a living hell. That part was actually kind of fitting. I was glad that she realized her mistakes, but it was kind of too late to fix anything by that point.
The beginning of Promises was really strong and I had really high hopes for the story, especially when reading it right after Just Breathe, but after a point it started to weaken. It was still stronger narration than in Just Breathe, but once Eviana and Kain got to Cotillion, there started to be more telling than showing and I noticed some occasional grammar mistakes pop up. I'm pretty sure I got an updated version of what was originally published, but a few things still slipped through the cracks.
My biggest frustration was how geography was generally just thrown out the window. I understand there's a disclaimer at the beginning that says "The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to [...] locales is entirely coincidental." But I don't think that's really an excuse to just use geography however you want when you name specific places.
(I'm gonna go geography nerd for a second here. Bear with me.) The beginning of the book mentions their beach is "emblematic of the northern California coast" on screen 14, but Eviana says she's from "around the Santa Barbara" area on screen 150. Now, I'm not clear on where the NorCal / SoCal divide is, but Santa Barbara is close enough to Los Angeles that I'm pretty sure it's still SoCal. Eviana and Brendan flee to the east coast, but Eviana mentions both Kansas and Tennessee, and both seem out of the way for how fast they were trying to get away. Google Maps did provide a route that cut through Tennessee, but there's no reason for them to go through Kansas, and I think it'd be impossible granted the time they made making the trip. Going through Kansas would add a lot of time.
There's also various mentions of the "Maryland coast", which in real life consists of Ocean City. You can count the Chesapeake, but what very little indication as to which coast they're on points towards the ocean one. Which is a ten mile strip of city. I'm not aware of any "private coastal parks" (screen 252) or "dunes" (screen 350) anywhere in Ocean City. It's impossible to drive more than a "half hour along the barren Maryland shores" while seeing "white dunes [that] were trimmed with green grasses and the occasional scrub pine" (screen 436) unless you're actually driving in Delaware. There's also a discrepancy with the Bay Bridge; Eviana mentions pulling into the visitor's center before paying the toll on the east side, but you only pay the tolls heading east -- there's no toll booth on their end of the bridge -- and as far as I know, there's no visitor's center on either side. (I could be wrong about the visitor's center. We've never actually stopped before going over it.)
Anyway, these are things that irked me because it's home turf. I might not have thought twice about it if I wasn't so excited to see "we were heading to the Maryland coast" on screen 251. I get very protective of the DMV and how it's portrayed in fiction. I get that Garr probably used the location to her own devices, but I feel like that works a lot better if you don't mention specific location names. If you're going to tweak geography to fit your plot, don't mention Baltimore or Severna Park. Or the "coast" that's just a city. I think Delaware would've fit the plot just as well, and I wouldn't have nit-picked it. Delaware really does have "barren shores" for at least a couple miles.
Okay. Moving on. I know those points really won't matter to most people.
Eviana was frustrating a lot of times as a main character, especially considering how selfish she was, but I was glad that she was at least able to look back and realize her mistakes. I was almost exactly the same age as her when I read Promises. It's kind of weird to think about. I really wish she would've sucked it up and gone through with the marriage to Kain, especially since she herself admitted that he was a nice kid and pretty attractive. (Although honestly, she described all the merfolk to be attractive, so I guess it's relative.) I still can't find any realistic proof that an almost eighteen year old would call her "forbidden" romance with someone "fated", but I guess it's happened before. (In Romeo and Juliet, at least. And look how that ended.)
I'm not sure that the romance would really be considered a love triangle, but it's definitely along those lines. I honestly was rooting for Kain more than Brendan (in case you couldn't tell already). There was nothing that made me support the romance at all, but I don't think it was necessarily bad. It was just mediocre and there was no real lead-up into it since Eviana and Brendan had been an established couple for a while before the beginning of the book.
Actually, I did like that part. There wasn't anything about Eviana falling in love. It was more about her struggles with maintaining the relationships, partly with the whole arranged marriage, and partly with what follows later in the story that throws in some even bigger hurdles they can't really jump over.
The worldbuilding for the merfolk was pretty cool. It was definitely more in-depth than in Just Breathe, and I'm not quite sure how it would check out realistically in tandem with the human world, but I appreciated the detail. It had the descriptions that I craved after not finding them in Just Breathe. I appreciated that they had selkies and the other water spirits I know they've mentioned in the Percy Jackson series but that I forget the name of. That helped to add some depth to the worldbuilding, too, since that added a little bit of background history.
I would definitely continue reading the series if only for the worldbuilding, but from the Goodreads descriptions of the subsequent books, there isn't really any promise that there's going to be more. I mean, there could be. I think my only option to continue on with the series is to pay the $2.99 to get Betrayal, and in all honesty, that's three bucks I could put towards trying out new series. If Betrayal goes on sale for whatever reason, sure. I'll probably get it. But I am a college student without a job who is trying to make the $60 in iTunes cards from Christmas last as long as they possibly can, for books and music.
TL;DR it was enjoyable, especially after Just Breathe. The MC's fairly immature, but the worldbuilding (minus actual geography) was solid. I don't think I'm ever going to be over the whole "barren Maryland coast" thing, though.
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