I really wanted to enjoy this book. It seemed to have everything going for it in regards to what I normally enjoy in my reads: fantasy elements (mer), coming of age, fake dating, LGBTQ+ rep, non-binary character as a lead. I honestly didn't think this would flop for me but there are several reasons why it did.

First: the strengths of this book. The premise itself is a strong one: Mer must spend one month out of the ocean, living among humans with their goal to help a human and earn their right to return to the Blue. It's interesting enough that it's obvious why it would draw readers in on the premise alone. I honestly would have loved to see more of the Mer and their world beyond what we get from Crest/Ross and the pedestal they tend to hold it up on. The characters were also a delight on their own, and I enjoyed them. There is a diversity among the characters that should be celebrated, simply because June does a fantastic job of working that diversity in as part of the normal lived experience.

But premise and characters alone do not a strong read make, and the flaws (for me) were numerous. Now, I know as an adult, I am not the target audience for YA, so not everything will land, but I read most novels with my students in mind and with the goal of finding books I can reasonably put on my shelves for them. I would be hard-pressed to do so with Out of the Blue simply because it seems to suffer from an identity crisis. The fantasy elements lend themselves to more of an upper-middle feel, but at the same time, the scenes leading up to the fade to black read more mature than a YA book often does to the point where I felt they were often misplaced and it took me out of the experience. And while I can appreciate June's highlighting of consent and having those conversations very much centered, it still reads very much as physicality=romance=love and that's where the romance fell flat for me.

Outside of the general tone shifting issue, the plot itself simply did not land for me. I went in knowing that there would be a month for everything to happen and wrap up, so I was expecting some areas to feel rushed, but ultimately a lot of it felt too quick for me. The initial build-up for everything was roughly the first half of the book to get into the crux of the whole fake-dating trope, in which there were several sweet moments, but then the last 30% seemed to be one drama after the next. Yes, with teens, this happens often, but reading through it, as an audience, I wanted some breathers in between. It was a bit of whiplash from one event to the next and it was kind of hard to keep pace with it all. I feel like one or two moments would have been better as a centering focus, and would have allowed for some breathing room with the potential of another sweet moment or two. The pacing just didn't really seem to work.

Sean and Ross (Crest) are each on their own journeys of self-discovery, with the time for their paths to permanently diverge quickly approaching, will the past 30 days they spent together be enough to win out over all the odds stacked against them?

I actually really enjoyed this book. I was a little skeptical going into it because I wasn't the biggest fan of Jay's Gay Agenda, but I really like most of what Jason June did in this story. The characters were well developed and the story was engaging. We had a fake-dating trope mixed with some friends to lovers (friends with benefits?) leading to some interesting issues our characters had to solve.

I also wanted to mention something similar I noticed between Jay's Gay Agenda and Out of the Blue that I liked, and that was how sex positive they both were. I appreciate more YA authors spreading the message: there ain't no shame in the sex game. And June's two books definitely cater to that. Also, can't say I'll forget the term 'stiffening eel' ever in my life!

Out of the Blue by Jason June is a sweet, messy and magical rom-com that is perfect for summer. It follows Sean and Crest (Ross on land). Sean has gone through a bad breakup and Crest in on a monthlong journey that all merfolk take, where they learn about humans and have to help one in some way. Crest helps Sean by fake dating him and making his ex-jealous. I'm sure you can guess what happens from there.

First of all, Jason June's books are effortlessly joyful and relatable. Both books I've read by them are extremely sex and body positive, and make me laugh out loud. Sean is plus sized, but always, always seen as desirable, which was such a treat. I also like how open about sex these characters are, although I could do without the details of mermaid sex ("scaling"). I also love the beachy, summery, Aquamarine vibes this gives off. I loved the romance a lot. My biggest issues come towards the end of the story, where we learn about the dumb and easily preventable mistakes every main character makes. It was honestly painful to read at points. Still, these characters learn from their mistakes and did their best to clean up their messes.

Overall, this is a 3.5 star read. I think its so fun, and I think Jason June's writing is delightful. This is a perfect summer read. And, as a bonus, the cover is gorgeous!

**Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an advance copy of this title in exchange for a fair and honest review**

This was a very cute book which ticked a lot of boxes for me. I enjoyed the romcom references and the storyline definitely felt like a classic movie. Wanting to win back your ex-love while trying to ignore your growing feelings for your "pretend partner" is a bit of a trope but it was handled well. I generally liked the characters and the ending had a few twists to keep me guessing about who / which lifestyle the main character would choose.

This book was really cute. I love the mermaid elements. It was fun and very youthful! I very much recommend!

I enjoyed reading this and I do like merfolk so this definitely helped make me enjoy it more. Hope to see more from this author and this was a good sophomore book.

Out of the Blue follows Crest who is a merperson who has to go on a month-long sojourn that all merfolk have to go. The rules are simple: help a human within one moon cycle and return to Pacificia to become an elder. Crest is eager to be done with their journey so he can be home because he hates humans. Crest meets a boy named Sean who is a lifeguard and who recently got dumped by his boyfriend. Crest thinks that helping Sean is the perfect way for him to get back home. Crest agrees to fake date Sean to make Sean's ex jealous. And soon fake dating might lead to real feelings and Crest might just learn that humans are not so bad. 

I will be the first one to admit fantasy books are not really my thing. But when I saw this on NetGalley I thought the cover was really cute so I requested it. And when I requested it I had no idea what it was about. I am so happy I went into this blind because I thought this book was such a cute read. And this was a perfect book to read during my Pride Month reads. I loved the relationship between Crest and Sean. I loved that this book was not something I normally would have chosen. I will say I did feel a little bit on the older side to be reading this, since this is a YA book. But I think this would be a good book for YA readers to read. Also, it is a really good summer read. Overall I would suggest this. Thank you so much NetGalley, Jason June, and Harper books for the ARC of this.

I absolutely loved this book! A phenomenal YA that is completely swoon-worthy. Fans of rom-coms and fantasy will love this book. Highly recommended.

This was a cute book but I think a little too awkward and "quirky" for my style. I enjoyed the general storyline, but wasn't as interested in the way that the characters acted or their communication styles. I think this might just have been a little to young for my interest level in the specific subject matter.

I plunged headlong into the deep end over this fantastic romantic comedy featuring hints of The Little Mermaid. Ross (they/them) is currently on their Journey (think and Amish rumspringa, but for 16 year old merfolks. Ross has one moon cycle to help a human, earn their Journey mark, and return to the Blue to become an Elder who's charged with preserving the ocean. Ross washes ashore on the beach next to the pool where Sean is lifeguarding. Despite nursing his broken heart, Sean is quick to jump into action to "save" Ross.

As the two get to know each other, they decide that Ross's Journey will help reunite Sean with his first love, Dominic. Cue the fake dating trope. We all know how that is supposed to end, right? Author Jason June will leave you breathless with every dip and twist of this journey. I loved all of the RomCom and cultural references (Pick me. Choose me, Love me). I especially love the shout-outs to The Little Mermaid (what's that word again? Oh, Street.). The LGBTQIA+ representation in this book was also amazing. Even better, there was NO homophobia! If you're looking for the next YA gay romance, look no further than Out of the Blue. This book gave me all of the jellyfish tingles!

I found the ideia of this book super cool and loved to see a non binary mermaid.

I think my favorite aspect of the book is the romance with a non binary person/mer involved because it’s hard to find it specially in a YA book.

I also found that a lot happened in this book and a lot that I wasn’t expecting. I found this to be a good thing but I can see how some people might not like how much stuff happened.

Overall I like the book and found it good but I didn’t love it although I’m sure a lot of people will love it.

I really enjoyed this more than I was expecting too. I really loved both of the characters personality and everything! So happy I was able to get the opportunity to read this!

I have some mixed feelings about this book. While overall, the story was fairly engaging and had a lot of interesting worldbuilding, all the pieces didn’t quite fit together for me.

What I liked most was the queer rep - we have a non-binary MC and an almost completely queer cast, and the book is stuffed with discussions around relationships, identity, and belonging that touch on the wide variety of experiences that young readers may be facing. Loved the distinction that Crest/Ross made about “hearts not parts” and how their identity was welcomed and explored on land where gender roles are more prominent. Every new/unknown character was introduced as “masculine-presenting” or “feminine-presenting” and I loved being able to step into a worldview that naturally saw these identities as more fluid.

Also shout-out for featuring an MC who is a superior athlete and doesn’t have a perfect physique. Love having more bigger bodied romance leads!!!

Another plus was the very strong environmentalism theme with the merfolk and the health and diversity of our oceans, and while those lessons landed heavy-handed at times, it was mostly good.

What didn’t quite mesh for me was the tone mix: you have a world-building concept that feels almost middle-grade in its description and complexity (the merfolk), a storyline that is solidly YA (dealing with characters coming of age, having sexual feelings and encounters), and then it’s packed full of 80s romcom movie references which flew over this young millennials head. I kept trying to figure out who the intended audience is, since I felt a bit adrift with these clashing ideas. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to be in a contemporary world or fantasy world, and I think leaning harder into the fantasy would have helped.

The book itself also seemed to want to play off of many of those rom-com tropes, but didn’t quite go all the way there. Everything and the kitchen sink was thrown in when it came to the culminating conflicts, and though I really enjoyed the ultimate ending / resolution, it felt like we traveled a long way to get there.

I loved this book!…until I didn’t. Bare with me.

The concept of this book is spectacular. Crest, a Mer person, is of age and must go on the journey. This is something all more people go through in order to continue living in the blue. In order to pass their journey they are given a month in the human realm and they must help a human. The task is complete once a mark shows up on their body.

Crest, who goes by Ross as a human, washed up to shore to find Sean. Sean Recently just got dumped and is feeling pretty heartbroken. Ross knows that this is a person he needs to help and their plan is to win back Sean’s ex. How are they going to do that? Well they’re going to fake a date obviously to make the ex-boyfriend jealous.

I absolutely love the fake dating trope and I thought Ross and Sean were incredibly cute together. Rose is probably One of my favorite characters ever written. He is such a mixture of grumpy and sunshine and he is just so funny and witty.

I enjoyed watching the two of them slowly fall in love and I thought the author did a great job at writing the start of a great love story. However the ending completely lost me. I don’t think that is how a romcom should end and I felt like it was way too abrupt and didn’t fit the overall vibe of the story. I still really love the book and will definitely recommend it to people but I thought the ending was very disappointing.

I really enjoyed this book. Being the founder of Fat Girls in Fiction I am always interested in fat representation, and I loved the neutral fat rep of the MC in this book. He was just a guy in a fat body who has boyfriends and is an athlete and has a whole life. I love that.
Also, I loved the story, a mer person has to come to land to help a human so they can return and committ themselves to the ocean. They have 1 moon cycle to complete the quest. The mer person Ray, (who is non-binary, because mer people don't have genders) meets Sean who had just been dumped by his boyfriend. He decided for his act of good will he will help Sean win back his boyfriend.
This is the perfect summer beachy YA read. I really enjoyed it.

Sean, a high schooler in LA, is in love with love. Well, he's in love with the Hollywood rom-com version of it. But his happily ever after dreams are crushed when his boyfriend dumps him out of the blue (heh) for another guy. Then one day on the beach he meets Ross. Ross is a merperson in disguise, on a quest to complete their rite of passage: help a human before the next full moon. On land Ross has legs, unless they get wet, which causes their fin to come out. As you would expect, it doesn't take long for them to get wet, and for Sean to get the shock of his life.

So Ross needs to help a human, and Sean wants to make his ex jealous enough to come back begging for forgiveness. Seems simple enough, until those inconvenient real feelings show up in their fake relationship. Out of the Blue is a tale full of sweetness and light, with some fun world-building (merfolk are from Pacifica and are nonbinary, using they/them pronouns) and excellent plus-size rep (thank you Jason June for creating a character who is not devastatingly handsome with abs of steel - and for putting him on the cover!).

My favorite part of Out of the Blue was its focus on the importance of home and community. If Ross and Sean want to be together, how will that happen? Will Ross have to give up his life under the sea and remain in his human form with Sean? I definitely recommend this book if you're looking for something lighthearted but with some serious bits. The pacing seemed a little uneven, and there were a couple of things that didn't work for me, but that may just be a function of me being an old lady and not the target audience for this book. But it's a sweet YA romance that you should definitely check out.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I was granted complimentary eARC access to Out of the Blue by Jason June after participating in a #FrenzyPresents preview event with the HarperCollins Canada Influencer team. Thank you for the NetGalley download! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

I'm by and large not a romance reader. I'm demisexual and just plain not interested in what we traditionally think of as a romance book. Out of the Blue is not a traditional romance book. This is two queer teens from completely different worlds bulldozing through just about every fake relationship trope there is with the added twist that one's actually a merperson with a deadline to return to the sea forever or never again. There's far more emphasis on the emotional romance side of things than on the more behind-closed-doors aspects of more adult, traditional romances.

There's also a ton of LGBTQIA+ representation and symbolism, and I'm so here for it. First of all, quite obviously, we've got merpeople. Merpeople have always been symbolically quite important to the LGBTQIA+ community and to trans and non-binary individuals in particular, so I love it that one of the two main characters and lovers is a non-binary merperson who has to discover what their true form really is. I also love it that we've got at least 4 AMAB characters who are gay or some flavour of bisexual plus a girl who's the adopted daughter of lesbians. This cast makes it look like straights just might be the minority in their part of town, and absolutely nobody in the book's version of the world has a problem with that.

On that note, minor quibbles time. Let's start with that last point. Okay sure, we're operating in an alternate reality version of Los Angeles where merpeople wash up on shore monthly to do the "how do you do, fellow kids?" routine, but not been the drunk idiots at the dock party have a single homophobic thing to mutter under their breath? This version of LA is too perfect in this sense. Second point, the Crest/Ross POV chapters disoriented me at first. In the first few chapters I was listening to the book via Kindle's screen reader, so audiobook but without the benefit of an intelligent voice actor who can make distinct voices, and I did find myself wondering once or twice if we were also getting a third POV from a second merperson. Also, I do love the fact the Mer are non-binary by nature and the forced different perspective of seeing the world through the eyes of someone who is utterly confused by gendered language, but the gendered language barrier was so heavy at first that I wasn't sure which "theys" were the subject's actual pronouns and which were Crest's language barrier. I think I have everybody's pronouns sorted now, at the end of the book, but I'm still doubting myself a little.

I do feel like I need to address pacing. I see some other reviewers talking about "emotional whiplash" and that feels quite accurate. I know we're playing hard into rom-com tropes because Sean is obsessed with rom-coms and both main characters end up recreating bits and pieces of famous rom-coms to impress the targets of their affection, but when you take every possible way the "fake-real turn" trope can work out and mash them all into the same plot, you're going to end up with a real tornado of a third act. Every time I thought I knew which way this one was going to work out we'd get another wrench thrown in. Given that we're dealing with 16 year olds, who love and move on fast, and given that they're modelling their lives after many rom-coms, I really don't see how to avoid the problems the last third of this book run into. I think it had to run the gauntlet it ran. I don't think slowing it down and adding more pages would have improved anything. That doesn't mean I don't feel absolutely tossed around by the last third of this book. And the ending? No spoilers here, but out of all the possible resolutions I saw forming as the plot twisted and turned that one didn't quite cross my mind. I'll just say it felt like a Beauty and the Beast moment, except nobody earned their way into or out of the magical stipulation in the final hour. Those who've read the book, chime in, did you get the same feeling?

Overall this book was very sweet, very engaging, and felt like nothing I'd ever read before despite constantly calling back to material we're all quite familiar with. While it's YA, it's mature YA, and I do think a broader audience will be able to enjoy this. Just keep in mind, fellow older readers, that this book does embrace how connected modern teens are with mobile technology and social media, so you'll either need a basic understanding of hashtags and how things go viral or be willing to just accept that those are things that happen and enjoy the story despite not understanding those things. They're minor, but they come up constantly.

If you love LGBTQIA+ content, young love, and merpeople, read this book!

Crest is a merperson about to take their Journey to the human world, in the next month they need to help a human out of good will in order to make the choice to stay a merperson or become human. If they choose to be selfish and not help anyone, they will be forced to be human forever.

I will start out by saying I really liked the way that the merpeople were not gendered and that the author took every chance to make every character queer in some way and there was no homophobia or purposeful misgendering. There was also some good attention brought to body positivity. It also didn't end quite like I expected it too which was a pleasant surprise.

But otherwise this book really played into every cliche trope and had some weird plot holes. Like that merpeople don't have a gender binary but that when they send their children to land their bodies are set to the human gender binary without any in put from the merperson. Crest even makes a comment about they didn't know why they'd been given this body. Crest also talked about how they were given "human lessons" but then didn't know how to cross a street or open doors or what phone apps were (but then was able to open and use YouTube fine on their own).

Also the amount of pop culture references was incredibly over the top (including the name Ross, which I thought was a coincidence and I just don't like the name because I don't like the character from FRIENDS, but more than likely Crest was given the name Ross as a reference since there is a reference to Chandler too).

Thank you to Net Galley for making this book available in exchange for an honest review!

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperTeen for this ARC in exchange of an honest review.

I have read several books with non-binary rep but that representation has always been relegated as a side character. And as someone which a couple non-binary friends myself it’s nice to see them in a main character roll.

The those who love books about characters with queer identities along with the fake dating trope is definitely the target audience for this book.

I found this book cute and refreshing and I really loved the friendship But overall I really liked all the funny and heartwarming moments.

I do have to say that I almost stopped reading the book because the beginning is a bit slow pacing and is the world building feeling a little bit forced.

All that being said this book is my queer aquamarine book that my younger self would have lived for.

A funny and charming little story! The details of the mer world were interesting, and I wish we had gotten to live in the mer world more often, though obviously that wouldn't have worked well with the plot. I liked how Ross/Crest grew into themselves on land, and I was satisfied with the ending.