Sandra Cox

Finding love is hard, even when you aren’t a mutant. Like most seventeen-year-olds, Piper Dunn wants to blend in with the crowd. Having a blowhole is a definite handicap. A product of a lab-engineered mother with dolphin DNA, Piper spends her school days hiding her brilliant ocean-colored eyes and sea siren voice behind baggy clothing and ugly glasses. When Tyler, the new boy in school, zeroes in on her, ignoring every other girl vying for his attention, no one, including Piper, understands why... Then Piper is captured on one of her secret missions rescuing endangered sea creatures and ends up in the same test center where her mother was engineered. There she discovers she isn’t the only one of her kind. Joel is someone she doesn’t have to hide from, and she finds herself drawn to the dolph-boy who shares her secrets. Talking to him is almost as easy as escaping from the lab. Deciding which boy has captured her heart is another story... 63,486 Words

Love, Lattes and Mutants

Kritika Narula

Originally reviewed at  So many books, so little time 
The story is meant to make you fall in love with it. Tyler is the ultimate male protagonist every fangirl will obsess about. These are the kind of YA book series we all wish to read every day. So, here's the deal. The female protagonist of our story is Piper, a dolph girl. And at school, she tries to keep a low profile to keep her secret a secret. But as luck would have it, keeping company with Holly and Tyler, the popular twins, defeats her purpose. And she lets go, because, well, Tyler is someone you'd do that for. Her character is the one that drives the whole plot, and that is delightful for YA readers. She has a family history, she has a secret, she is the one Tyler is chasing, she is the one who will decide how this story twists. Her attempts at keeping a low profile, like wearing oversized clothes and donning nerdy glasses, multiplied how adorable and endearing she was to us.

At one juncture, the story takes a turn and frankly, had it not turned bak to where this all had started, i would have been heart-broken.
There is an element of hilarity as well. Although why anyone with a name like Edgar should be arrogant is beyond me. Even this Edgar guy, the character is so well-etched, underneath his social facade of arrogance is meanness and cruelty, and that goes on to point how shitty High school can get.
The story never got boring, and I liked it the way I like reading Jenny Han.
I am definitely looking forward to the next in the series, and hoping it has more of latte.

Rachel Kanyid

Disclaimer: I was sent this book to read for review.

★★★

To start off with,this book has a very rushed beginning. The main characters are thrown at you very quickly - within the first two or three pages. And it is not a pleasant introduction to these characters at all. They are shoved into your faces in such a way that you are expected to already know them, seemingly, and the setting is rather uncomfortable.

The main characters are highly stereotypical of nearly any kind of highschool related media:

Piper, the main girl, is an orphan girl, living with her grandfather on the California coast, and she appears to be a world's biggest nerd to anyone who sees her, but under her nerd exterior is a super hot girl that only Tyler can see.

Tyler, the main boy, is the new boy at school, and he is very proud but he is also super-mega-foxy-awesome-hot, and very, very chivalrous. All the girls at school. excluding Piper, trail around after him like cats in heat. So of course he falls in love with Piper.

Holly, Tyler's twin sister, is extremely annoying, very attractive, and likes to meddle in affairs that have nothing to do with her.

While, these types of characters are very common in high-school age books, having all three together at once is a bit much. Fortunately, after the first chapter is over, things start to work better.

The first chapter ends on a cliff-hanger where we find out that ----DUN DUN DUUUUUUN---- Piper is not as she seems. She is actually a mutant.

Piper is part Dolphin: She has turquoise eyes, a siren voice, a blow hole on her back, she can stay underwater for up to half an hour, and she likes to swim in the Ocean at night saving helpless sea creatures.

We find out that her parents are both dead, due to some accident, and her mother was a Dolphin/Human hybrid that her grandparents found stranded at sea when she was a teenager. Her mother grew up as an adoptive daughter of her grandparents, but her father fell in love, instead of treating her as a sister, so they got married.

Now, this book is--just like it sounds-- filled with all kinds of cheesiness, but I found that the parts of the story centralizing around her life as a "Dolph-Girl" were actually really fun to read. The stuff in the high-school part of her life drove me nuts and I had to scan through them.

If you really like light-hearted-contemporary-mermaid stories, you will probably like this.

It has a fair amount of intrigue: a kidnapping, near death experiences, true love, plot twists, and the works, but it is light enough that you can fly through it in an afternoon quite easily.

The writing is pretty good, and the story building is magnanimously better than some novels I've read that have cult followings.

The only thing that I really disliked about this book, and this is coming from someone who has been a coffee enthusiast for many years: 
Piper loves her 'lattes'. 
She refers to them as having a chocolate flavor.
Lattes don't taste like chocolate, because lattes don't have chocolate in them. 
They are straight cream and espresso.
If they had chocolate in them, they would be mochas.
Get your coffees straight, Sandra. Haha.

Overall, I think this book is definitely worth reading if you're looking for a light hearted, contemporary-fantasy that contains mermaid-story-like qualities.

 Bruna Acioly Leão

Not totally unreadable but...meh
The mutant plot was kind of cool, but it took way too long to kick start and things from the last bits of the book are spoiled at the synopsis (bad marketing, hello).
And the romance, let's just say this book is a great example of why people hate insta-love and love-triangles.

Love, Lattes and Mutants

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