Jason June has been an author on my “need to read” list since last year. I was super excited to see Jason come out with a new book this year and knew I needed to read it and not let it sit on my shelf as most books do.
I saw Out of the Blue get hyped pretty well on TikTok and instagram. I think it was a good summer read. We follow Crest who has to go on a journey on land to help one human. Crest tumbles into Sean’s life and decides that Sean is the human he will help. However, Crest has never seen or been in the human world before because Crest is a mer-person, or mermaid.
Sean was recently dumped by his boyfriend and the last thing he needs is to babysit Crest. Not knowing Crest is a mer-person, Sean finds himself seeing Crest every day and can’t figure out why this kid keeps following him around. It low key stalkerish.
I liked the idea of mer-people being non-binary. In a way it just made sense. However, I struggled with the narration of the story. It was hard to follow between characters’ ideas and actions. There seemed to be a conflict between the characters’ development and narrative. I personally did not like that almost every chapter all Crest could think of was sex. This is not a smut book and I felt like it was overused and done in an uncomfortable way.It was pretty cringe when Crest would bring up the topic. But that wasn’t the only hard-to-read spot. The characters go back in forth with wanting a relationship to being just fired which I felt was done in a poor way and just needed to be cleaned up to work.
I did enjoy the story that was trying to be told but overall it just needed a little more development to be a really good novel. I gave this book 3 out of 5 stars
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