Midnight Pearls: A Retelling of the Little Mermaid By: Debbie Viguié

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• Title: Midnight Pearls: A Retelling of the Little Mermaid (Once Upon a Time #4)
• Author: Debbie Viguié
• Publisher: Simon Pulse
• Publication Date:  June 1, 2003
• Pages: 208
• Genre: Fantasy
• Recommended Age(s): 13+
• First Read: 2015
• Source: Library 
• Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 stars

I love fairy tales, the originals and the re-tellings both and I've read a few books from this series. Some are better than others, and this one is certainly one of the top ones on my list. Hans Christian Andersen's original The Little Mermaid is my favorite fairy tale, so I was very excited to come across this book. And I wasn't disappointed at all.

This re-telling is only very loosely based on the original tale, but I really enjoyed it because there were enough twists that it didn't become too cliched. It's a classic tale that was told in an interesting way. 

My favorite part of this book was the beginning and I was in tears by the first sixty pages, which is not an easy thing for a book to do to me. I was feeling emotions that I didn't  even know I had inside of me because you know, feelings. The exposition was extremely well written and I was sucked into the story by the first five pages. I fell in love with Pearl and her family, and cheered for her relationship with her best friend James.

I was fully intending on giving this book a full five stars, but I ended up lowering the ratings because halfway through the book, even more characters showed up who I did not know how to feel about and completely messed up with the love story that was already brewing. And after the first 100 pages or so, the plot started moving at a pace that I did not much appreciate, because I quite liked the existing state of things. Like I said, there were twists, and I couldn't come to terms with some of them, but I still gave this book a solid rating because I enjoyed the story as a whole.

I finished this book in one sitting over the course of a couple hours so it was a fun, fast read. And I'm writing this review just hours after I've read this book, so emotions are still kind of swirling around me. Not as much as they were when I was reading at two in the morning, but they're still there.

Definitely read this curled up under your covers at midnight because there will just be feelings that you can't control and if you're like me, you're in for an interesting ride!