Shoreline: 2nd Edition by Jennifer Loy

My rating: 2.5 of stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Paranormal Romance, Fantasy
Content: Strong language, Several sex scenes that start out steamy but end up mostly fade to black.



Dr. Trina Parker flies to the island of Oahu for a medical conference. All she wants is for the conference to be over and to get some peace and quiet at the Lanikai beach house she rented for the week. One night, while taking a dip in the ocean, she gets caught underwater between two figures in a struggle-enemies, rivals...and mermen. Soon, Trina finds herself on the adventure of a lifetime. Journeys into the depths of the sea, secret cures, and an intimate relationship with a mythical creature, challenge all the science Trina has learned as fact. Will she choose the love of her life, her career, or get the best of both worlds?

Another guilty pleasure read because sometimes I guess I just need to read this kind of stuff. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, but anyhow... I read the one I had bought for the reading challenge (Merman's Kiss) and thought to myself, surely books with mermen in them have to be better than this one was... apparently not.

I picked this one up because it was a stand-alone, and it sounded more romantic than erotic, which is NOT my thing. I will say that my main problem with this book wasn't the Merfolk, although there were a few issues there, especially in the beginning. My main problem with this book is the main character. How can a character be a doctor who is so intelligent, but still be too stupid to live at the same time?

There were a lot of interactions between characters in this book that didn't make sense. For example (minor spoilers here), a woman is attacked and left unconscious, and then found by a man she just met a few days before. Instead of taking this unconscious woman with a head wound to the hospital, he tries to take her back to her house, but it's locked and he can't get in, so he takes her to his place and puts her in his bed. This woman wakes up in the middle of the night beside this man she doesn't really know and just takes it in stride. He did nothing to her, but she doesn't know that. She doesn't freak out. She doesn't try to leave. People don't act this way! This is also a woman who was sexually assaulted as a teen. I think she would have been traumatized by this experience. We do come to understand why the man probably didn't take her to the hospital much later in the book, so that part made sense after that, but why get in the bed with her? This same woman is almost raped by a different man near the beginning of the book and she doesn't seem phased by that either. Unbelievable.

So obviously I had some real problems with the way characters behaved in this book, and I thought this was pretty dumb and cheesy at times, but also kind of romantic at times too, but not nearly enough to make up for the things I didn't like. For the life of me I just can't figure out why it was so hard to put down. I enjoyed reading it enough to give it 3 stars, but the other issues with the story make me want to give it 2 stars. That's the reason I settled on 2.5.