This story takes a new approach to suicide awareness and mental health. However, the story was very confusing for most of the book and took too long in weaving the three perspectives together. The ending is the best part of the story and concludes the story very well. The story follows Coral, Brooke, and Merrick as their stories collide with each other. Coral is a mermaid who is terrified of having a disease that killed her older sister called the Red Tide. Mermaids have no souls and the Red Tide is explained as giving human emotions to mermaids. Brooke is a patient at a psychiatric ward who is coping with her sisters suicide and eventually trying to commit suicide herself. Merrick is the son of a CEO of a million dollar company and does not want to do as his father wishes. These three slowly come together and secrets are revealed, even if that happens at the very end of the story. It is an amazing story that helps to spread suicide awareness.

Ughhhhhhh I wanted to like this book so bad!!

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Listen, before I get into this review, I want to applaud Sara Ella. Mental health is so complex, and people who don't deal with it just <i>don't understand</i>. What the author tried to do here is fantastic, she tried to spread an awareness and <i>understanding</i> of people who struggle with loss and poor mental health.

When I picked up this book, and one of the first lines was, "You are not nothing, my friend, and neither am I." I wanted to cry!! I have struggled with anxiety, depression, and suicide, it's why I READ books, it's to escape, to find characters who are like me. I want there to be more books that promote an understanding of what anxiety/depression is, and how it affects people, and how to help. And I truly am thankful for people like Sara Ella who are writing stories and spreading awareness for help.

<b>And this book almost, almost, almost nailed it.</b>

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<i>"I've discovered the secret to breathing underwater, she wrote. Don't. Hold you breath as long as you can. Count to ten, then twenty, then thirty. Don't breathe. Don't surface until the nothing comes..."</I>

UGH such beautiful quotes wasted on such boring characters!! I think that's what got me the most about this story. For one, the main characters themselves don't have definitive personalities. It's almost like they are defined by their mental illness, and I <i>hate that</i>. If you ask me who Coral is, I'll say an anxious mermaid. Merrick? His sister, who doesn't have that much of a personality either, tried to commit suicide (literally, what are his other traits?? I don't even know). Brooke? .... okay well Brooke was the better of the bunch, she's a suicidal girl who loves the sea. Her love of the sea is the only thing that marks her a deeper personality, whereas Merrick & Coral? They just didn't feel <i>real</i>. They weren't complex, other than Coral's want for revenge on her sister and Merrick looking for his mother, they didn't have anything else to them.

Pair the bad characters with the bad pacing...and you got yourself something rough. This book is incrediblyyyyyy slowwwwwww, at the 48% mark I made a note on my Kindle: "What's the plot?" Once you GET TO the plot (takes an eternity), I hate to say it, but the writing flopped. It's the little things that irritated me, like the fact that in EVERY SINGLE CHAPTER the author would talk about the Red Tide, and NEVER TELL US WHAT IT IS! Hiding something that is so important to a story for literally no reason doesn't make it a <i>mystery</i>. Like there was no reason why Coral talked about the Red Tide so much--it KILLED her sister and started the whole fiasco--and we don't know what it is. Once I'd reached the 75% I wasn't intrigued by what the Red Tide was, I was just tired of being kept in the dark the whole damn novel.

Alright, alright, alright, let me take a deep breath. I know what kind of picture I am painting, and truly this book wasn't ALL bad. Like I mentioned, the mental health part of the story was nailed on the head. I felt the author depicted what anxiety/depression felt like quite well. I liked the immersion of the sea world with the real world. I like the...ambition this story had.

But it just wasn't my favorite for execution. I would recommend to pick it up, for all I know you might react to it differently and it might help you on your journey with mental health! For me personally, I just could not look over the execution mistakes.

With that said: keep spreading awareness! Keep spreading kind thoughts!

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<i>ARC acquired by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.</i>

“There’s more than one way to drown. I’m drowning and no one even notices.”

"Coral" is a "very" loose retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid." It is told in three perspectives, showing the effects of mental illness, specifically suicide, from all three points of view.

"Sometimes you have to swim through a bit of darkness if you're going to surface in the light"

Coral - The youngest of three mermaid princesses. She fears the Red Tide is coming for her because she carries the "disease" that is slowly killing her oldest sister. This "disease" is human emotions. Mermaids have no souls and turn to sea foam when they die (this ties the story in with HCA's story).

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."

Brooke - Is a patient at Fathoms Ranch psychiatric ward coping with the loss of her sister. After attempting to disassociate herself with everyone at the facility, she eventually warms up to Hope, a very young girl who attempted to take her own life.

"Who knew a person could drown without ever stepping foot off land?"

Merrick - The son of the CEO of a million-dollar company who does not want to bend to his father's wishes. Certain events lead Merrick to rebel against his father and learn some hard truths along the way.

These three souls collide in a way that I was not expecting. I appreciate this story for what it is trying to do. I think Suicide Awareness needs to spoken about more. Sara Ella did a great job telling the effects of suicide from two of the perspectives. However, I feel that the plot could have been executed a little better. It starts out really slow with each chapter being a different character's POV. For more than half of the book, I was confused as to why we needed three perspectives. The ending wrapped all of the up, but as a reader, not knowing the ending, I felt like there were too many loose ends until the end. I also felt a little left out when Coral makes her transition from mermaid to human. She acclimated to human life with no problems and never mentioned her life under the sea again. I feel like the majority of the plot lines had too much going on to keep my attention. Jumping from one character to the next was confusing until the big reveal toward the end.

Overall, the ending of this novel was my favorite part. Sara Ella wrapped up the story beautifully. The love story intertwined with suicide awareness is not a romantic happily ever after. This love story shares the ups and downs and being with someone who carries mental illness with them everywhere they go. It shows that love can happen between two people who are willing to work for it. Together.

"This was her world. And she was drowning in it."

First of all - Thank you netgalley for providing me an e-arc of this book. The opinions expressed are my own.

I had no idea what to expect when i started this book - I happily went into it thinking 'Yaay-It's a mermaid book - I've got to read it!' and oh gosh - was I left confused.
This isn't an ordinary loose retelling of the little mermaid. This book handles suicide, depression and mental health. The story starts with three perspectives and to be honest, i only enjoyed Coral's perspective. She was confused but strong and willing and I liked her.
I enjoyed the take on Brooke and the 'Red Tide'. However, I flipped through Merrick's pages as he didnt seem very interesting.
I liked the book, but I wish there was more intensity to it. I wasnt grappled or struck by emotion. GIven that it was based on mermaid retellings, my expectation was not blown.
Please take care while reading the book - because of mental health triggers.

Thank you Netgalley for a digital ARC of Coral in exchange for my honest thoughts and review!
I was SO excited to get to read Sara Ella's new book before publication. I followed this book all the way through its creation, which was so much fun to follow!
I really did enjoy this story! I really loved following these characters' stories and I was invested from the start.
The romance was so cute, though it was missing out on just a little bit of development. However, they were in no way a perfect couple and had their struggles and disagreements.
My biggest issue with Coral is the timelines, which really got confusing about halfway through the book because of spoilers. The way events happened without explaining until later confused me and I wasted time flipping back through the book, which is annoying in an E-copy.
Overall though, this book really gave me a new respect for mental illness, and I appreciated the way Sara handled writing it.

Coral, Brook and Merrick.

Three seemingly different characters, are thrust together in a "Hans Christian Andersen-esque story."
Each harboring their own struggles and demons, "Coral" takes a deep look into metal illness and the way is affects not only those suffering from it, but those around them.

This book carries some pretty heavy subjects, depression, suicide and taking care of ones mental health.
Books like this are so important in today's society and I praise the author for breaking down the stigma that mental illness should be tucked away and not spoken about.
However, I did find the actual flow of the story to be quite confusing. And even when it was explained, I still felt a little lost.

Although a little choppy it was still a good read.

"I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own."

Using a fairytale approach to address mental illness is a fitting vehicle. While the storyline does get confusing at times, it helps to see the darkness a person must journey through to recover from trauma. There are also some good coping techniques that provide valuable touchstones for those who have experienced trauma. What gets a bit rough is the youngest character in the book's seeming self-awareness - this character doesn't seem real because they are presented as wise and witty. In 18 years of working with this age group, I've never met a child who is like this. As this is the reality part of the book, I wish the characterization was a bit more authentic.

“I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.”

Coral interested me for two reasons:
1. I wanted to see how well it handled the topics of depression and suicide.
2. Mermaids are cool.
Clearly, one reason is more adult than the other. Did I feel like I got what I came for? Yes, because hello, MERMAIDS.
Okay, slightly more serious talk now.
I’d call Coral a hard-hitting contemporary with an essence of magical realism. In real life I’m close to people who struggle with these sorts of problems and so I felt the topics were handled well in the story and it was insightful.
The story has three points of view it jumps between, Merrick, Brooke and Coral (the mermaid). All three POVs seem unrelated at first and so the book does require some patience, it’s not massively fast-paced but a story that lets you get to know the characters and makes you root for them to solve their problems.
Coral is our fantasy element, a mermaid who is worried to feel because that’s not what mermaids do.
Merrick is struggling to mend his broken family, or at least the pieces he cares about and tries to do the best he can.
Brooke is struggling with depression and perhaps the hardest point of view to read but the people she meets throughout makes it so much more rewarding to read about as we see how they affect her as a character.
Overall the story comes together like a puzzle, which makes it a fulfilling read at the end. I loved it by the end, it’s one of those novels that’s a journey. Sara Ella handled the topics brought up well. I seriously loved the book quotes Hope and Brooke share, they’re from modern stories like Divergent and it made the characters feel more modern and rooted in the real world.

Really loved how this dealt with suicide and mental health. Not a lot of books do, and I think it is something we need more of. Because no one is "nothing" and no one is alone.
The back and forth of the story threw me off a little, but I enjoyed the characters, and seeing how Brooke came to terms with where she was and beginning to heal. Just the right amount of happy ending and heartbreak to be real life.

I am speechless. This is such a beautiful book, I’m having trouble figuring out how to accurately express how much this book impacted me. Coral is a blending of fantasy and reality that seamlessly relates the stories of a little mermaid, several young women, multiple fractured families, and the illnesses that affect them. It is at once a story of hope and despair, of color and dullness, of darkness and light.

On the surface, Coral incorporates a loose retelling of the fairy tale The Little Mermaid with a story of depression, suicide, and anxiety. It is a story that can be extremely triggering for some, so please be cautious when you read it. However, please don’t let that stop you from reading this gem of a book. It is written in a way that makes these illnesses real in the best way. It does not tiptoe around anything but still manages to describe it all in gorgeous prose.

I stayed up all night reading this book. Every time I tried to put it down, two minutes later I sat back up and picked it up again. This will be a book I recommend for a long time to come.

Thank you to Thomas Nelson Publishers and NetGalley for the ebook for review.

I've received a digital ARC from the publishers through NetGalley.

Even though the pace might be slow in the beginning, what attracted me to this book is that it's about mental helaht, and it's quite realistic in it's fantastic way.
Life is difficult, and we have all these emotions that are difficult to deal with, but they can be dealt with.
And love.
Love is all.
Love for others, but certainly self-love.
So yest, it's a good book.
Quite moving.
But sometimes difficult to read.
So be warned.

This is a hard one to review. The writing is pretty, there are some memorable characters, and the plot is clever. Plus, most importantly, it has an honest and positive message about mental health. That being said, I ultimately didn't enjoy it that much - because it was really hard to keep up with what was going on. And it was pretty slow-paced. I went into this expecting a mermaid story, which is kind of what you get, but also not really...can't say more without spoiling it.

You don't figure out how the three plots intersect until about 80 pages from the end. I guessed it about 100 pages in, but it wasn't confirmed until later. This means that you spend a lot of time reading about things that don't seem related at all, which gets kind of boring. However, the way the plots intersect is quite clever. I might have enjoyed it more had it been revealed at the beginning. It was also clunky having one perspective in first person present tense and the other two in third person past tense.

However, I'm still giving it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4, because I think this was a really excellent book. Just because it wasn't my personal favorite doesn't mean it isn't really well-crafted. it starts off with a trigger warning from the author, which I'm glad about, because it's heavy on self-harm and suicide. But it doesn't glorify them. It paints the ugly, painful, depressing reality of what it's like to live with real depression. This is such an important message - that depression is a disease like anything else, and that people need to be treated with respect and get the help they need. There were positive portrayals of therapy, which I always appreciate. And you get to see a character slowly, painfully getting back on the path to "regular" life.

The book stresses that there's no single path to healing. Everybody has a different route. And that's something really beautiful that the world of YA needs. I think it's #ownvoices, but I'm not completely sure. The author does a great job being sensitive to how she portrays mental illness.

I loved Hope. She was my favorite character, and the reason I'm giving this book 4 stars instead of 3. You'll see, she's really remarkable.

*Thank you to NetGalley for giving me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

I'm a sucker for retellings and Coral hit all the right notes, especially since I haven't seen a little mermaid one in a very long time.

** I was given a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest thoughts/review**

This book was marked as a DNF at 30% of the book completed – Okay so the whole premise of this book had me beyond intrigued and once I started reading I was really disappointed! Which is sad because I wanted to like it but no matter what I just couldn’t connect with the characters and the situation. I found that from what I had read the writing came across as vague at points, I think the approach was to be that of sparking curiosity in the mysterious (an example being the ‘Red Tide’ which is introduced in the first chapter and not explained until the end (I looked ahead)) but it fell flat.

I do appreciate the author’s approach and intent with the theme of Mental Health discussions and representation in this piece and I feel that Sara Ella did a good job focusing on that in her story but there was just an emotional disconnect with the character’s in that regard which I REALLY didn’t want to happen.

I received this arc from Netgalley for free in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I am a sucker for retellings and that is what drew me to this book. Once I got into it I realized this is so much heavier and important than just a retelling. This book explores mental health issues we battle and how they impact us. This also explores how mental illness is perceived and how it impacts those who know and love us. This being a YA book I am so greatful to the author for making a book that young adults can relate to. I am no longer in that demographic but I do wish I had something like this to help me a long in my younger years. This is how we make mental illness stop being so stigmatized. Absolutely necessary and brilliant.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

At first I wasn't sure about this book - the concept of using the Little Mermaid as an allegory for depression felt a little forced. But it won me over with the way the storylines intertwined and the careful and considered way it discussed mental health issues, including suicide. I think many teenagers would benefit from reading this book - as well as adults!

Thank you to net galley for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for a honest review.

I loved this one. I loved the characters, the setting, the storyline and the magical feel it had. Very enjoyable.

*I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.*

It doesn't happen often. I'm good with words and I've always been. I'm an annoying talker and it's when I go silent that you have to worry. But after reading this book and crying myself through the last 20% of it, I don't know if the right words to describe this book, how it impacted me, what it stirred in me and how amazing this experience was, even exist. I don't think they do.

This book was a pure, real, honest, raw and painfully true description of depression, its effects on the people suffering from it and its effects on those around them. Not once does the book sugarcoat the darkness, not once does it gloss over the consequences and the utter emptiness, not once does it show only the uplifting and positive outcomes. It shows depression, anxiety and suicide in all its faces and forms.

It uses an interesting story telling structure to do so. It uses quotes from other writers, three different perspectives, letters and black pages. The e-arc version had some lay-out issues, but I can imagine how the final result will look in the printed book and I think that will totally make it easier to grasp and to enjoy. Not that I personally had any trouble understanding and following the story and the characters. I also figured out quite early on in the book how all the storylines would eventually come together and I was proven right at the very end.

On top of that I love the fairytale like writing style that has been used to tell this story. It's lyrical and flowery, but it fits the fairytale retelling part of the story and I think it counters the heavy topic and emotional impact a little. For me it was also the fairytale like writing style, leading to beautiful quotes hitting very close to home, that eventually broke me and made me sob and cry.

This book is a very realistic and true description of depression and suicide mixed with some fairytale elements. However, the book is emotionally heavy and impactful and can be very triggering if you're sensitive to it. Make sure to take care of yourself while reading it.

I loved the premis of this book akin to the little mermaid. I didn’t find it lived up to the hype and it seemed to have more of a political message

Coral is a wonderful book in its own special way 🐚

I have to be so careful to not give away any spoilers but this is a wonderful read about mental health issues and how they may present differently in everyone🤕

It starts off a little confusing and I had trouble keeping up and making sense of the dual storylines🤦

The characters weren't particularly likeable in my opinion 💁 but as a mental health sufferer myself I have to say they come pretty close to reality. What I do enjoy is the different interactions all the characters had and how they tied in to each other😊 it's these twists and plot devices that make Coral a great (albeit sometimes difficult) book to read ❤

It's quite a heavy read in terms of potential triggers but this is disclosed and explained in the author notes at the beginning of the book ❤ it also has a beautiful ending that left me both in tears but also smiling wistfully. 😩

Overall, it's a good book. Not something I'd read for enjoyment but very good for educational purposes 👌