Thea Galleon is your typical eighteen-year-old girl…almost. Between classes, coffee dates, and looking forward to her Pisciessoan Tail Ceremony, life is good, but long buried secrets threaten Thea and her beloved mermaid community.
Bellamy, a Cephalian half man-half octopus, is on a mission to discover information about the deadly White Blight, a highly contagious illness plaguing these two secretive species. An encounter with Bellamy throws Thea’s quiet world into a tempest; she discovers she was adopted, and worst of all, is suspected to be human.
Accused of treason, Thea sets out with her best friends to escape the secluded island of Bailerunda in a race against the forces that would keep them all in the dark.
Will she find the truth about her past, family secrets, and government schemes, or be imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit.
Breakaway piqued my interest early in the assessment of my batch of SPFBO books, because while on one hand it looked to use a number of standard YA tropes, it also subverted a few – namely in the story being about a young woman who didn’t discover she was special so much as discover she wasn’t. In a society of people who can transform into mermaids at will once they pass their nineteenth birthday, Thea Galleon discovers she’s actually human.
The setting of Breakaway is modern, with cellphones and computers and modern clothing, but the community of Pisciessoans (mermaid peeps) on the island of Bailerunda live in a safe zone separate to the tourist areas of the island and maintain a sort of physical and social separation from the rest of the world right down to their access to information about the outside world being curated by their elders.
While Thea is the main character of the story, there are also point of view sections focussing on her friend Calix, who gets his tail at the beginning of the book allowing us to see more of the mermaid parts of the worldbuilidng, and Bellamy, a Cephalian (octopus guy). Their chapters serve to fill out the world and give alternate views on what is going on, but do little to further the plot, not really having their own stories. Bellamy in particular, despite his seeming importance, goes more than half the book without existing at all. This makes sense in terms of how constrained he is by the narrative, but he had so little weight or presence in the story that his sections seem to go nowhere and be just a set up for him to be important in the second book.
That small frustration aside, I liked the characters of this book. Thea is a fairly traditional YA heroine – she’s not like everyone else and there’s a mystery around why, she has unique abilities, and is self-absorbed in a socially acceptable teen way – yet she was also both a knowledgeable guide to the world and meaningfully communicated her mixed feelings around her adoption and her untethering from the community she grew up a part of. A lot of the world building is told to us directly through first person narration, yet these straightforward laying down of the details didn’t feel like they dragged the story or were info-dumpy, having been worked well into the sense that Thea is telling us her story.
Tonally and thematically, Breakaway is an interesting mixture of light teenage drama with the awkward beginnings of romance, and quite dark turns and concepts including the mass control of social groups, a shady and unfair justice system, and scientific testing on unconsenting subjects. These ideas all underpin the plot and the world building and are not used for shock value, but the increasing growth of them throughout the narrative surprised me considering how light the beginning felt, so be forewarned.
The first 30% or so of the book is well-paced and full of mysteries and decisions Thea must make about her future and who she can trust, but this sense of tension and pacing is lost for much of the rest of the book. Steering clear of outright spoilers, the middle half of the book becomes something of a fetch quest, going place to place in search of clues that will take them to the next place and hopefully closer to what they’re trying to find. Any inherent tension is removed by the happy coincidence that everywhere they go there’s someone keen to help them and they’re always right about where they should go next – there are no dead ends and even the people following them (presumably added to increase the tension through this part) are deliberately shown to be no actual threat to them. So what starts off reading like a tight, twisty urban fantasy with bonus mermaids and lots of promise, ambles off its own track and manages to make even the discoveries in this portion of the book less exciting than they ought to be. It gets more or less back on track for the ending and I have high hopes for the second book, but had I been less persistent I might easily have given up in the middle rather than reached that point. As it is, the questions raised and the mysteries left by the book’s ending have me keen to find out what’s going to happen from here.
Despite its wibbly wobbly middle bits and occasional moments of wtf fridge logic, I really enjoyed reading Breakaway and recommend it to anyone looking for a twisty YA novel exploring themes of community and identity, as well as the dark side of controlling and ‘protecting’ secret populations with their own rules. Oh, and mermaids.
- Devin
Our other SPFBO reviews for this year:
- Finnian’s Fiddle by Chandler Groover
Check out our intro post for this year here.
Thank you so much! This was my first foray into the writing realm and everything you said sums it up, both the good and bad. I so appreciate you deciding to finish it and post such a thorough review.
Dezarea Dunn