Review: The Siren's Secret

 

The Sirens's Secret by Heather Oslter

Genre: YA

My Rating: 1 of 5 Stars

Goodreads Says:  Julia’s life has gone from complicated to nearly impossible! When Julia loses her shapeshifting powers and her appearance changes in alarming ways, she flees to Sirenity, where she learns an incredible secret about her mother. In this thrilling sequel, Julia must take greater risks and make bigger sacrifices as she discovers who she really is and what she can really become.

 

Heather Ostler has been blessed by the cover gods once again. It’s another awesome cover! 

With said, sadly, my excitement ends there. 

I mentioned in my last review that I thought this series had loads of potential. Essentially, this is the story of a teenage girl who finds out that she is a Shapeshifter, comes from a long line of royalty and was born in a world full of magic. 

I had high hopes for the first book and although I wasn’t thoroughly impressed by the end of that book, I still found myself intrigued enough to read book two, The Siren’s Secret.

Again, I found myself awed with the cover and the synopsis and only hoped beyond hope that the writing had improved.  It didn’t and this saddens me. Writing is more than just putting words and ideas together. It’s about making the reader feel a connection, transporting the reader into a world that is very real in the author’s head and heart to the point the reader believes that world is real.  

I felt a huge disconnect throughout the entire book.  There are a lot of characters in this book and we are supposed to believe that many of them are emotionally tied to one another, like best friends, family, and love interests. Not once did I ever feel like these emotions, these bonds, were real.

We are to believe that Julia will one day rise up to lead her people. I’m sorry; I can’t see that happening at all. Julia is the biggest brat and the most immature character I’ve read in a long time. There is nothing about this child that screams leader or anything at all that a leader possesses, like common sense. 

Sirens are awesome and I liked how they were incorporated into the story. I just didn’t like how Julia was incorporated into the Siren’s story. In fact Julia ruined the whole Siren experience for me.  She focused on all the wrong things, in my opinion.  Julia’s new world is in the middle of a very real war. Her dad is targeted to be killed all the time. She finds out that she has a connection with the Siren community. Tell me why the only thing that bothers her for at least half the book is that she is destined to be without a husband.  Of all the questions she could have asked a seer of sorts, she asks if she is truly destined to be alone. She didn’t think to ask if she will be a good leader, how the war will turn out… I don’t know anything but will she be married one day. 

It was disappointing. This is the girl that is supposed to lead a whole world. 

Finally, the most frustrating part of this whole thing is that once again this world is oozing of Harry Potter. It’s not an attempt to re-create the feeling of Harry Potter; it’s an attempt to be Harry Potter by changing a few details plus editing a huge chunk of that series so that it may fit into three books in this series.  That huge disconnect I wrote about earlier, it has something to do with the book feeling really rushed. When I stopped to think about the whole thing, the only thing that made sense was that the rush was due to trying to incorporate a whole bunch of things that would normally happen in like seven books, to happen in three.  

The similarities are just insane at this point and it really upsets me.  

I hate writing these kinds of reviews but I have to be honest.  I won’t be reading book three in the series. 

An ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley for an honest review.