The synopsis of this book had me sold for sure, but boy did it disappointment at parts. I'm all about finding self love, experience new things in life but the way that this was put together annoyed me a bit. I feel that Lucy was not likeable and the inter-species sex with Theo was uncomfortable to read. I will say that I enjoyed reading a story about a woman and merman falling in love versus the typical mermaid story.

The story of a gal trying to get her life together was a little too over the top for me. I couldn't quite relate to anything in the first half of the book which I then put down

“Obsessive love”? I think it was more like obsessive lust. Okay, maybe some love but for the most part this is the story of a woman who went off the rails and searched for love in all the wrong places. The worst place was the ocean. That’s where she met the merman, Theo, whose siren call (his charm and attention to her) she could not resist.

I did not like this book and I think the reason is that I didn’t like any of the women and I did like Theo and he disappointed me. Besides, this is a very depressing book. I’m on a personal campaign to read books that are uplifting and the blurb led me to believe this would be one of those. Unfortunately it isn’t. The author is accomplished at turning a phrase but what comes across is someone who is very unhappy. This is just another man-bashing tirade

The synopsis says this book is "original, imaginative, and hilarious." I could maybe give the first two a pass, but "hilarious"? This book is not hilarious.

The narrator, Lucy, is an unpleasant person who makes highly questionable decisions—from randomly breaking up with her boyfriend and trying to get him back, to neglecting her sister's sick dog, to wheeling a merman into her sister's house in a wagon. Oh, and having sex on a white couch while on her period. She makes biting and honest observations about every person she meets. Sometimes these observations are funny, but I wouldn't call any of them hilarious.

This was well-written and very readable (if weird and uncomfortable), but I'm left with questions about the whole merman thing. Was he real? If so, why the hell wasn't Lucy smarter about her interactions with him? Wheeling him into the house, even though it was a short distance, seemed like a lot of unnecessary work. She could haul him across the beach at dawn and after dark without anyone noticing, but they couldn't just have sex on the beach at night? Okay... Also, did she REALLY think [she wouldn't die if he took her to live with him under the water? And if he wasn't real, that was a shitload of detail for a freaking fantasy.

A couple more things:

1) I don't enjoy reading about poop? Specifically, I do not want to read about a woman pulling poop out of her butt in preparation for anal. I don't think near-perfect strangers would be discussing whether or not one of them had ever pooped in a wet suit.

2) There was so much cock talk in this. Not just referring to dicks, but stuff about Lucy metaphorically having a cock during sex. Becoming the cock. I don't know. It was odd, and I guess the author may have been trying to push literary boundaries or something? Lucy also mentioned that she wanted a dick because she wanted to feel that power between her legs.

3) The cover is stunning.

I have to admit this was compelling in a trainwreck sort of way. I didn't exactly enjoy it, but I read it in just a few sittings once I got through the off-putting first chapters.

2.5 stars

A brutally vulnerable and honest novel that easily elicits gasps and groans- the good kind. One of the saltiest stories of love, self acceptance and mythical lore.

This book was…a lot. At times I thought I really enjoyed the bluntness of the main character and the writing style but in the end it made me cringe more often than laugh. Conceptually, I loved it. In execution it was just too crass for my taste.

The Pisces by Melissa Broder is about Lucy. Lucy has spent over a decade working on a dissertation that she kind of doesn't care about anymore. When she accidentally breaks up with her boyfriend, her sister invites her to spend the summer in L.A., dogsitting her sister's dog while her sister is away. All this is mere setup for the main even of the story. Lucy meets and has an intense sexual relationship with a merman named Theo. Yes, you read that right.

I honestly don't really know what to say about this book. It's incredibly weird, but not so weird that it's unreadable. Some of the sex scenes lean towards pretty good while otalso pretty much a horrible person. hers are pretty horrific. The book is told entirely from Lucy's perspective so you get to read her inner thoughts. She is quite funny and thoughtful, but she's more or less a horrible person. There are relatively long passages about Lucy's dissertation that made absolutely no sense to me since I have little prior knowledge of the subject matter. It's a jumble of a book with no real plot to latch onto and no real characters to care about. Although I did like the ending quite a bit.

Recommended for people who like freaky fish porn.

Right up front- I read and kept reading this one with a side eye because, well, the main character, Lucy, is not likable and then there's Theo, a merman, and there's graphic interspecies sex. Lucy is horrible to her sister's dog and even WORSE to her human friend Claire. There's also graphic (used that word again for a reason) descriptions of bodily functions and mental health problems. Hmm. Somehow Broder roped me into it, even though it was pretty much not my cup of tea. The writing is good, the plot is one you will love or hate (or hoot at), and all in all, give it a try. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Try this one if you're looking for something very different.

This book is not for everybody, and from time to time it was not for me also. Gross to the point of being disgusting as sometimes reality is, able to dig in the deepest feelings of people and not always the nicest one. But still absolutely worthy of reading, I won't forget this novel for a long long time, but please, don't call it a love story.

Questo libro non é per tutti e spesso non era nemmeno per me. Nauseante fino al disgusto come puó essere a volta la realtá, capace di scavare nei sentimenti piú umani; ma certo non i migliori, ciononostante assolutamente da leggere. Non dimenticheró questo romanzo per molto tempo, ma per favore non chiamatela una storia d'amore.

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

Lucy is almost forty and somehow stuck in her life: she has been working on her thesis on Sappho for years now, but has lost track and doesn’t advance anymore. The same is true for her relationship with Jamie who cannot decide between moving together and founding a family and needing more space for himself. When the university threatens Lucy with throwing her out and when Jamie refuses to make a decision, they dramatically break up and Lucy flees to her sister Annika’s house in Venice Beach. Since Annika will be away for work for a couple of weeks, Lucy agrees to baby-sit her dog and stay there for a while. With the help of a love addiction therapy group and Tinder, Lucy tries to solve her problems and to figure out what she really wants in life. When she meets a cute swimmer on the beach one evening, this might be the sign she has been waiting for.

The novel sounded quite enthralling to me since I thought that it would be easy to relate to the protagonist: being at a turning point in life, questioning her job and relationship, added to this an intellectual female character who might have an interesting approach to the whole love stuff. Moreover, “love addition therapy group” promised to be great fun to read since it sounds quite absurd.

To sum up the novel, I am a bit disappointed which might be my own fault since I did not pay too close attention to the fact that the novel is rated as “Women’s fiction”. Thus, the protagonist wasn’t the intellectual character I had hoped for, but quite some dumb and brainless being who was only searching for men to spend her nights with and who devoted her days to browsing shops for clothes (which she bought for an incredible amount of money) and thinking about her make-up and waxing. Lucy is incredibly shallow which annoyed me a lot wasn’t in tune with the intellectual researcher we got to know in the beginning. Apart from this, there were by far too many explicit scenes over too long paragraphs. Some readers might like it, it’s just not my favourite type of novel, but as said before, I didn’t pay close attention to the genre.

After the first half of the novel – which had some quite funny incidents and absurd dialogues that I really enjoyed – Lucy meets the swimmer. First of all, I thought that I had misunderstood something. Then I was waiting for the moment Lucy wakes up and realizes that she had quite some strange dream. Yet, this moment never came, the author simply implemented some utterly bizarre prop which didn’t work for me at all.

I can understand why some readers truly enjoy to read the book, it just wasn’t one for me. Too strange and weird in the plot, the protagonist not really authentic and too many explicit passages.

Man this book was way weirder than I anticipated and that’s saying something. I’ve been riding this mermaid trend in 2018 and this one was a dudd for me. Merman erotica basically sums this up. Chloe was a character I didn’t like, the writing was super vulgar and I didn’t like the ending.

This is…not an easy book to read, or review, for that matter. I think readers will be really divided over it. It’s one of those that you’re either going to love, or fucking hate.

Right up front you need to know that while this book is marketed as a romance, it doesn’t read like one. This is more like women’s fiction, where the majority of the story is dominated by the female lead and her anxiety and obsessions. The merman sex doesn’t come along until a good ways in, and even then, for me, their relationship didn’t feel like the sole focus of this story.

The Pisces opens with a bad breakup, and the weird WTFery that persists throughout its entirety is apparent in the very first few paragraphs, so I really recommend getting the free sample of this before you make a commitment to buy it. If you can handle the level of the main character’s existential angst in the sample pages, then you *should* be okay.

Other things you should prepare yourself for: this character is not the most likable. Female readers tend to judge female characters incredibly harsh. I myself am guilty of doing this. Especially with books written in the first person. Because when you’re reading something like, “I fucking hate all these people,” but you, the reader, don’t actually hate them and think the MC is just being an asshole, it creates a disconnect that can be hard to get past.

There were MANY instances while reading this that I thought the MC was being an asshole. Or that I was totally disconnected from her decisions because I would never make them myself. And yet I was able to get over it. Because Lucy is so brutally honest.

You know those terrible things you think? About life, love, other people, etc? The thoughts you pretend you don’t have? Those instant criticisms of strangers based on their physical attractiveness, their clothing choices, their weight? Lucy puts all of that inner monologue right in your face. And it can be soooo uncomfortable to bear witness to.

The people in her group therapy sessions are turned into archetypes through her skewed lens. I think readers will struggle with recognizing that is what is happening and that these characters are not actually one-dimensional. That this author is not actually shitting on therapy or medication or getting help when you need it. She’s shining a light on the fact that sometimes getting help sucks. Sometimes recognizing your own mental health needs is fucking hard. People who have never had to deal with depression, or anxiety, or neurosis of any kind are going to have a tough time connecting to Lucy in the first half of this.

It isn’t until around the 40% mark that things begin to turn around. That Lucy is able to recognize some of her more unhealthy behaviors and thoughts. That she begins to see past appearances and connect with the women around her in a way she’s been longing to her whole life.

That isn’t to say that she doesn’t have setbacks. That she didn’t do things later in the book that made me want to tear my hair out. But the fact that this author somehow had me hysterically laughing a page or two after each one made it easy to keep reading.

So, while this book is definitely not for everyone, I can’t recommend it enough for those who have read this review and still found themselves intrigued.

The Pisces is for readers who don’t have to love their female main characters to appreciate a book. For anyone who craves that catharsis of seeing in print that sometimes seeking help for your mental health isn’t the shiny bastion of love, acceptance, and healing that some people try to make it out to be. For fans of The Shape of Water and Mrs. Caliban that can’t get enough of cross-species steaminess with thought-provoking introspectiveness.

This gem of a book perfectly distills the pleasure, pain, and impossibility of love addiction. It's brilliantly written, funny, and deeply moving. One of the most unique books I've read in a while.

Thank you Netgalley, Crown Publishing, and Melissa Border for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was weirdly a very relatable book that had me laughing and sighing as there's a few of Lucy's thoughts that sounded so eerily similar that it was hard to think for a second that she was a fictional character.
Lucy is a flawed and stunted women in her thirties who has unsuccessfully been writing a dissertation about Sappho that has gone nowhere, very much like her relationship that has, as we find out early on ended after so many years, which leaves her in an odd place both personally and professionally.
I did appreciate Lucy's original voice as it's not something that is really written with in mind. She's a very distinctive voice that honestly, felt that it came either from my own mouth or my girlfriends and that's seriously refreshing as not all women are sugar and spice and the thought process is the same. With that being said there are some definite serious moments where I had to shake my head and remember that this is fiction and acting like a lunatic under the name of love, is not the way to go about it but overall a really great read!
Will be looking out for more from this author!

Actual rating: 2.5

Over the years there have only been a handful of times where my tendency to judge a book by its cover has steered me wrong. For one I would like to give Rachel Willey major props for her cover design for this book. It is so striking and even after finishing the book I’m sitting here going, “but the cover is soooo pretty.” The marketing for this book has also been great and the shout outs, while misleading for me, were what brought it home after my initial head raise for the cover. Oh, Merman? “Uproariously Funny”? Erotica? “Gloriously strange”? Count me in. SEND ME AN ARC PLEASE!

I found most of the writing of the ‘erotic’ variety very sterile at the beginning and then further on so caught up in flare to lose my focus on the page. I am all about words taking on a poetic bend to bring home the emotion of a character and the story; this book felt very distracted by it.

There were a few times I agreed with Lucy’s inner observations of how she perceived the world. I could see myself feeling those same things. As the story goes on I kept asking what Melissa Broder is trying to achieve with her character here, though. I have read books wherein we are supposed to hate the narrator and be drawn in more and more by the nature of the reader vs. anti-hero relationship. From one page to the next you don’t know if you will be championing a possible redemption story or screaming out your fury because they are such a disgusting human being. Here it was incredibly unclear what I am supposed to feel about this character. Obviously there were moments to feel uncomfortable.

I never found this book to be funny and it wasn’t so much strange as trying to be something it wasn’t. It wasn’t, to me, an erotic merman story. It wasn’t funny. It didn’t achieve a redemption or a failure. I mean yes she makes a final decision at the end, but I don’t see her sticking with an upward path.

Maybe I’m asking too much of a ‘novel’, but I found this jumbled and wishing for the ending. I don’t know what more to say because I agree with other reviewers people are either going to hate or love this book. I’m stuck feeling like I don’t want to spend any more time with this book and I don’t hate it necessarily, but I’m glad to be done with it.

It is increasingly odd to me how we tack on the word ‘strange’ to things that are not strange or that could be stranger. Erotica if anything is supposed to bring a deeper intimacy to whichever art form it is being used in and yes that’s not for everyone, but it’s meant to emote stronger feelings than ‘strange’ or quickly forgotten.


Review appears here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2312877759?book_show_action=false

This was a bizarre book; I'm not even sure how to rate it. I remember seeing the cover - a lady hugging a fish - and not even thinking that this might be "mermaid erotica." It was compulsively readable, but some scenes I found to be gross. Occasionally I like "open" endings but this wasn't one of those times. I did not like Lucy at all and what she did to her sister is practically unforgivable. Read an arc early courtesy of Netgalley.

Honestly, I had to force myself to finish this book. From the first page, I couldn't stand the protagonist and my opinion never changed. I ended up skimming through this book and thought each of the women presented was equally obnoxious. While the author can write well rounded and developed characters, I wish she would use this skill to write more compelling characters and stories.

This was an odd, difficult to get into book. I have it 50 pages and still it did nothing for me. Its the first book that I've read for Netgalley That I can honestly day I couldn't get into.

Thank you to the author/publisher/Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Lucy is in her late 30s getting over a nasty split from her boyfriend and heads to Venice Beach, CA to dog sit for her sister and to attend therapy sessions for women with relationship and depression issues. She tries her hand at making a love connection and unexpectedly finds a match with a mythical creature. Lucy ponders her yearning for that great big love and in the process uncovers a lot about herself. I admired Lucy’s spirit and her gutsy analytical view on relationships.

'I fell asleep out there every night, tipsy on white wine, under the Venice stars, with my feet tucked under Dominic’s gut, belonging to nothing familiar.'

Lucy is stunted, far too many years writing her dissertation about Sappho, the love between her and Jamie coming unbound, but surely he only wanted to put space between them? It’s not a for good break up, right? She does something a little crazy, thus ends up leaving for Venice beach for the summer and ends up housesitting for her sister. Not much is expected of her beyond caring for a diabetic dog, Dominic and attending group therapy to contend with her obsession with love. This group forbids ‘hooking up’, or getting your next ‘fix’ in the form of men, it is better to date yourself, know thyself and to thyself be true. Refuse the urge to fill yourself up with encounters and relationships, it will never be enough, that hungry beast inside of us all can’t be filled by another person. This wisdom falls on deaf ears, in Lucy’s case.

Lucy is having none of it, she has a dark unsettled thing dragging her down, so she decides to date because nothing revives her like the chase. Her encounters are meant to be erotic, but so many end up being ridiculously hilarious. Nothing romantic to see here, just painful prodding and playacting, and for what? That’s her problem, isn’t it? Trying to attain some intense feeling that seems always out of her reach. Playing the role of vixen, so she can feel the hunger and desire of men. Until she falls for a Merman, and things turn bizarre. Surely this will be erotica for other women, for me what worked was the funk in her head space. Even fantasies don’t stay within the bounds we create, run amok, take us down. It’s all about committing and choices in the end.

She meets other love addicts in her meetings, headed up by Dr. Jude. Of course Lucy can see how some of the women deceive themselves about the men they are trying to get over. Like many of us, her insights are spot on when it comes to those other lost losers. Too, it feels more like a ‘misery loves company’ club than support. She scoffs at the idea of self-love, and finds a connection with Claire. Claire’s chaos isn’t a different brand than Lucy’s, though she can point out her every flaw. Both women are reaching for unavailable love, gorging themselves on men, occupying their time with rejection and fleeting sexual encounters rather than examining what is wrong, broken and limping inside of them. Surely their sorrows cannot all be laid at the feet of men.

The funniest moments were Lucy’s liberated sexual encounters, because she isn’t doing it for her. She isn’t really thinking about her own pleasure. It’s just the men running the show. Grin and bear it… sure, but why? I think a lot of women, though not as many as who will admit it, have been there; doing things their partner wanted that did NOT feel good for them for various reasons, at different points in their life. It is cringeworthy and I had a visceral reaction to the bathroom romp as well as to the aftermath. As humourous as the novel is, there is serious dysfunction. You never win love by acting like a lunatic, and going on the attack, not love worth having at any rate. When she falls for Theo (the sexy Merman who seems to only want to pleasure her) she longs to attach herself to him like a barnacle. With Theo pulling her out of the dark pit of her love for Jamie, what will happen when he reaches out again? Jamie is an earthbound man, he is her history, and he has legs! Is any of this real, is love really salvation? How do you separate fiction from fact in any love affair? Is it necessary for Lucy to maintain a distance, in order to desire a man? What will Theo demand of her and more importantly what will Lucy demand of herself?

Just what is Theo? Why has he come in her life now? You have to read the story to find out.

Publication Date: May 1, 2018

Crown Publishing

Hogarth