Mini Review--The Scent of Salt & Sand by Kristin Cast & P.C. Cast

 

In Amber Smoke and Scarlet Rain, acclaimed bestselling author, Kristin Cast, built a world in which the walls that separate Tartarus from the mortal realm have been breached, releasing every variety of evil into the world. In this novella, she sends her fans on a separate journey, one that will meet up with the rest of The Escaped series as it continues on its spellbinding journey.

The Sirens aren't evil by nature. Their song lures men in, and only by trying to procreate and continue their species do they reveal their true, monstrous nature. When some Sirens escape to the mortal realm, they hide out in San Francisco, blending in as best as they can. They are on a mission: to find the ideal partner to mate with.

Melody is on the hunt, and when she meets Dean, she sees a target who will allow her to fulfill her purpose. What she doesn't count on is falling in love — a love that could destroy them both.

 

 

Going into Kristin Cast and P.C. Cast's The Scent of Salt & Sand, I knew it wouldn't clear things up about the series ending and I expected to be heartbroken by that, what I was not expecting was to experience a different kind of heartbreak because omigosh this ending hurt! Lol.

How to write a review for a short story that was apart of a novella series, it's a mini-mini review I guess! Lol. While this takes place in the same world with Tartarus and the mortal realm, we actually don't see any of our regulars. This is new territory and we get to meet the sirens. A brief history lesson was that the sirens had caused too many deaths and while Hera didn't want them killed for simply existing and being their natural selves, she had the Furies create an oasis for them, a prison within Tartarus, but separated. 

The sirens were given a glided cove for their prison, but they would not remain imprisoned for long as they found a way to get to the mortal realm and...procreate. They learned they could be impregnated by mortal men and have a new breed of sirens as their progeny. They of course, killed the man after the deed, for they were still sirens. Now, every year, they send select their sirens to go to earth and do their best to get pregnant and kill as many men as possible. This is the year that Melody is selected and it fills her with dread as she's not your typical siren.

It's when she's resurfacing the ocean in the mortal realm that she meets Dean, a police officer on the night shift who thought she was a damsel in distress and needed saving as it looked to him that she might have been drowning. And soon a sweet romance begins to start between these two. Dean has always been looking for the right woman, and Melody has been more or less avoiding romance as her kind doesn't really get to have that in their lives.

Melody is dealing with the pressure of her siren family urging her to do the deed with Dean and kill him and move on. Their time on land is limited, because for unknown reasons the sirens start to age while on earth whereas in their prison, they are ageless. Strange things keep happening to Melody that she can't quite explain and I kept thinking something was up with that as I was pulling in other thoughts and thinking how they were not adding up.

Well as far as explanations go, I got one I was not expecting at all! It was eye-opening to say the least! Another thing I was not expecting was that ending! Omigosh, what was that?! I had hoped for closure with this one, closure for the series at large or at the very least closure for this story and I got neither! Lol. I was not expecting that ending and then the epilogue only made things more confounding! It made me wonder if the sirens would have been apart of the third novella we never got or if there would have been another short story with them as things just did not feel 100% complete. It was a "good enough" ending in some respects, but I guess it's the knowledge that we should've had more with the series at large that makes me wonder if there would've been more to this little story too!

So yes, I ended up torturing myself and my psyche with this series. I fully expected it, but as I said, I am glutton for punishment at times. I can only hope I will get a chance to talk Kristin's ear off later this month to get some much needed closure! Keeping my fingers crossed!

But all in all, this was a delightful and entertaining story! I enjoyed it parallelism to the OG fairytale, The Little Mermaid. While I wouldn't call it a retelling per se, there are definitely common trends to it that made it appealing! I just wish there was more!

Overall Rating 4.5/5 stars