PROMISE BOUND

This conclusion to Brown’s mermaid trilogy follows efforts to reunite families and to gain power among the mermaids of Lake Superior.

Lily, at age 18, is a bit of a reluctant mermaid. She has a human mother who’s afflicted with multiple sclerosis and a father who, as a merbaby raised on land, was not returned to the mermaids as required by an unbreakable mermaid promise. Lily’s heartthrob, Calder, is actually around 50, but as merpeople age far more slowly than humans, he looks like an adolescent. Learning he was kidnapped as a toddler and transformed into a merman, Calder heads north to try to find his biological human parents. Meanwhile, Lily tries to convince one of the mermaid sisters—both locked in an internal power struggle—to transform her mother in order to save her life. All the while, Lily seems to be in contact with the spirit of Nadia, who wants somehow to keep her broken promise to Calder’s birth mother to return her son. Brown writes with more sophistication than usual in mermaid fiction, lifting this book a bit above the norm for the genre, and she displays a good touch for characterization, thanks in part to an alternating first-person narration; even the more villainous mermaid sister feels well-rounded and believable.

Good entertainment for fans of the genre.