2.5 stars!

This is a YA fantasy inspired from Korean mythology. In this world every year a girl is sacrificed to the sea god as his bride so that he may stop his wrathful storms that ravage the human lands. Except this year, our MC, Mina jumps into the sea as the bride instead of the intended bride, who is Mina's brother fiancée. The story moves from there as Mina navigates the spirit realm and tries to find a way to break the sea gods curse and also to stop the storms for once and all.

This started out good, I liked the set up of the story and the first half of the book was quite enjoyable as we explore the spirit world with Mina and get to learn the various politics and problems of that world. However, as we move towards the 2nd half, the story started to feel all over the place. There was so much happening in a short amount of time that was neither explained properly nor executed well. A lot of the stuff felt rushed and rather convenient. I never truly felt that there was anything to worry about, despite our characters being in danger time and again.

Mina is a quintessential ya heroine. There was absolutely nothing about her that stood out to me. I liked the theme of familial love in the story but again nothing that was extraordinary. The other characters were okay, they had potential but weren't fleshed out enough. Although, I liked some of the friendships that Mina was able to form, I didn't care for the romance or the faux love triangle. The romance was simply not convincing and it escalated at a speed that just didn't feel believable. There's a villian but once again their motivation isn't explained well or even felt convincing to begin with.

I think this just wasn't the book for me. The cover is very pretty though!

ARC provided by publishers via Netgalley!