Tempest

Tempest Rising is the first in a trilogy. Check out the second, Tempest Unleashed, and the third, Tempest Revealed.

Tempest Maguire wants nothing more than to surf the killer waves near her California home; continue her steady relationship with her boyfriend, Mark; and take care of her brothers and surfer dad. But Tempest is half mermaid, and as her seventeenth birthday approaches, she will have to decide whether to remain on land or give herself to the ocean like her mother.

The pull of the water becomes as insistent as her attraction to Kona, a gorgeous surfer whose uncanny abilities hint at an otherworldly identity as well. And when Tempest does finally give in to the water’s temptation and enters a fantastical underwater world, she finds that a larger destiny awaits her-and that the entire ocean’s future hangs in the balance.

Although Tempest’s mother is a mermaid, like many mermaid stories, Tempest and her family is fully aware of this, unlike many mermaid stories. She doesn’t stumble upon some hidden secret but is fully expecting her seventeenth birthday, the day she will either remain human or choose to be mermaid. (Although there is a secret involving Tempest’s future she has yet to discover.)