Review – The Other Fish in the Sea by Jenn Cooksey

• Title: The Other Fish in the Sea
• Author: Jenn Cooksey
• Series: Grab Your Pole #2
• Previous Book: Shark Bait
• Next Book: Shark Out of Water (release date unknown)
• Source: Personal Purchase

Description from Goodreads:

In Shark Bait, readers everywhere met and fell in love with the new girl, Camie Ramsey, and swooned over her sure to be future husband, Tristan Daniels. Now, in The Other Fish in the Sea, the long anticipated second installment of the Grab Your Pole series by Jenn Cooksey, Camie and Tristan are back, but so are their friends!

So, find a breathing apparatus and shimmy into your scuba gear, because it’s finally time to dive deeper into the lives of the GYP gang, but be warned, it’s a big world out there and an even bigger ocean where danger might be lurking around the next corner and realistically, anything could happen.

Review

When I first read Shark Bait by Jenn Cooksey last summer, I knew there was going to be a sequel, but honestly, I was so in love with Shark Bait and thought that the ending was so good that I wasn’t hugely impatient for the it. However, when Jenn started tweeting about The Other Fish in the Sea more and more in the last couple months, I got real impatient real fast! lol I was DYING for this book. My heart broke a little when I got denied an ARC. But I convinced myself it was okay because it wasn’t a long wait. I even rearranged my entire reading schedule so I could reread Shark Bait first! And I started The Other Fish in the Sea as soon as it came out!

I loved The Other Fish in the Sea. I literally spent the day it was released doing only what I absolutely had to and reading every other moment. I even stayed up until almost 2:00am, on a school night, to finish it. And I am both so excited and so disappointed that I did. Anyway, let me backtrack a little.

After the Prologue, The Other Fish in the Sea starts off with Camie’s group of friends hanging out at her house, which seems to be their new normal and talking about their Thanksgiving plans. I gotta say, there was nothing hugely exciting or overly dramatic going on in this scene, but I still loved it. It was like I never left San Diego or my group of cool high school friends. It was just a really cool friends being friends scene, and I was immediately immersed back into their world.

I felt like The Other Fish in the Sea was a much more evolved book than Shark Bait was. Yes, there were the lighthearted and absolutely hilarious moments that Shark Bait was full of, but there was also more emotions, period. There were some more heartbreaking scenes as we finally learned more about Kate’s, Tristan’s, Jeff’s, and Melissa’s lives, both past and present. There were some heart-stoppingly intense scenes that had me holding my breath. There were the stupid-teenager moments that had me groaning or rolling my eyes. And there was more romance. Oh yeah, there were also more sexy times. People are definitely not kidding when they say that Jenn Cooksey’s books are Mature YA. But they were realistic.

One of the things I loved most about The Other Fish in the Sea is that there were different narrators of the story. This wasn’t frequent, with narrators changing every chapter or so. Of the 31 chapters, counting Prologue and Epilogues (yes, “Epilogues. There are two.), only 5 of the chapters are from narrators other than Camie, but I loved them. We got to learn more about the characters and see certain things from different perspectives. Of course, these chapters aren’t marked. There is no indication that the narrator is switching. However, Jenn warns of this in an Author’s Note just before the book starts, so I was prepared, and I thought it worked. I actually did pick up right away that the narrator had changed (meaning she did a great job with differentiating their voices), and I was also able to figure out who the new narrator was before it was revealed! I thought that was cool, almost like a mini-game within the book!

There were several surprises throughout The Other Fish in the Sea, most pertaining to our main group of friends, but there were also some surprises involving their parents that I thought were really interesting. There are different relationship dynamics, with new relationships forming and other relationships evolving, and I thought it was really interesting to see those side by side.

Now, the reason I kind of regret binge-reading this book like I did: the ending. It wasn’t a bad ending, but it was kind of a cliffhanger. Okay, forget kind of. It was a MAJOR cliffhanger, and guess what? Even Jenn doesn’t know when book three will be released, which kind of makes me want to scream, cry, tear out my hair, and stomp my foot in a 2-year-old temper tantrum! Believe me, The Other Fish in the Sea is well worth the read even with the major ending, but I want to know more NOW! I’m sensing a reread in my not-too-distant future!

Okay, so that was a pretty long review, and if you read it all, thank you! But I just loved this book and had so many emotions while reading it. Honestly, if I weren’t trying to avoid spoiling it for you, my review could probably be double the length just to talk about everything that happened! I HIGHLY recommend reading the Grab Your Pole series and would easily give it 5 stars and then some!

Tagged: 5 stars, contemporary, Grab Your Pole, Jenn Cooksey, review, self-published, The Other Fish in the Sea, YA