Title Girl Out of Water Author Winifred Burton Cover Art S.A. Hunt Publisher Cirrina Books - 2014 First Printing Cirrina Books - 2014
	Title Broken Wave Author Winifred Burton Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Category Fantasy Warnings None Main Characters Tabitha, Amelia, Sydney, Bambi, Irene Main Elements Wizards, mermaids Website winifredburton.com

Girl Out of Water

Girl out of Water brings the reader into a world right under our noses but we never noticed, with a host of interesting characters, in particular the quirky Tabitha, our protagonist, and her friends Sydney and Bambi. Tabitha is perhaps the second black main character in a fantasy novel I've come across, after Ged in the Earthsea series.

I really enjoyed the magical world Burton had built up, but I wish we got to learn more about it. Most of the time Tabitha was being kept in the dark and I'm surprised how quickly she adapted to it without knowing much about it. Irene as well didn't quite understand her powers or the world of magic around her, having been left on her own to figure it out. The book could have used a good edit, something that's pretty common for independently published books.

I loved the fact that one character is an unbalanced physicist and the other is a little bookish with an odd sense of fashion who doesn't quite fit in. While Tabitha was easy to like, Irene was psychopathic, she had no redeeming features, she just killed for no apparently reason other than it was a way to deal with things that bothered her, absolutely no feelings for the people around her. While this is a valid psychological condition, it just made her so evil that she lost depth (meaning there's no background story, she just seems to have been born this way). Also I never quite figured out what her goals were. Did she want to take over the world? Punish the human race for being mean to her? Power? Knowledge? Not quite sure.

Now I always give independently published book some leeway (after all, professionally edited/published books have typos too) but I have to take marks off when the errors actually make it hard to figure out what is going on. At times words would be missing from a sentence, leading to complete confusion, and I found it was often hard to tell which character was talking at any moment in time. At times I felt even entire sections were missing, Tabitha went from being completely unaware of her powers to understanding magic, without her either being told or her sitting down and thinking it through.

But this world has a huge amount of promise and I could see this expanding into a very rich and complex series. Just not sure I would spend any money to find out, maybe if I got a free copy of the next one too I would consider it.