Atlantia - Ally Condie

Atlantia by Ally Condie 
Published by Dutton Children's on October 28, 2014 
Pages: 368
Genres: Dystopia, Fantasy, Mermaids
Format: eARC
Source: Edelweiss

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Can you hear Atlantia breathing?

For as long as she can remember, Rio has dreamt of the sand and sky Above—of life beyond her underwater city of Atlantia. But in a single moment, all her plans for the future are thwarted when her twin sister, Bay, makes an unexpected decision, stranding Rio Below. Alone, ripped away from the last person who knew Rio’s true self—and the powerful siren voice she has long hidden—she has nothing left to lose.

Guided by a dangerous and unlikely mentor, Rio formulates a plan that leads to increasingly treacherous questions about her mother’s death, her own destiny, and the complex system constructed to govern the divide between land and sea. Her life and her city depend on Rio to listen to the voices of the past and to speak long-hidden truths.

Characters & Relationships: Despite Rio, our main character being a mermaid and having such a powerful voice she sure as hell read very... Blant. She is passing through a hard time, with her sister gone, without any family, having to hide from everyone what she really is, but still I couldn't manage to connect with the girl or fell anything for her, the secondary characters too just never felt fleshed out enough for me to care for them. I still really enjoyed the sisters relationships in this book, they're pictured as such strong bound between two people, more books should have this, unfortunately the romance front didn't hit me as strongly first because this book has so much more that could have got away without any romance but mostly because I didn't care for these characters.

World building & pace: Okay, so first let me clear out that this is a dystopian book where something happened with the clima on the above and some selected people went to live below, but then some weird thing started to happen to the people below and some of them started to become mermaids, for some reason unknown. So if this kind of thing bothers you - things happen and are never given a good reason - just stay away from this book, for me it wasn't a major turn off, it bugged me a little but I could suspend my disbelief and keep going. But the thing that DID bothered me was the pace, oh boy this book was slow, and slow, and slow, and them BAM! everything happens in like 10% of the book and it's finished and that was it. Now, I don't mind slow books - hell, The Vanishing Season was more slow than this and it's one of my all time favorites - but it bothers me when there is things that should be happening and are not, and them pisses me off when things are rushed to make it fit on the ending, NOT PLEASED.

Recommended to: readers who want mermaids or really liked the atlantia idea when they're kids (which is why I picked this one up), readers who liked Ally Condie's other works.