This book was another DNF for me. I read about half of it before finally giving up completely and skipping to the end. I received a paperback review copy from the publisher via Goodreads giveaway. 
 It wasn't an outright terrible book, really. Just boring. And a little odd. 
 For example, there are no quotation marks to indicate speech. Every line of dialogue looks like every other line of not-dialogue, and it is up to the reader to figure out when a character is saying something and when they're thinking or doing something. It isn't always easy to tell. This got very annoying very fast. 
 The book includes photographs of many of the fish that are described in the text, as though to prove that these are real species and they actually do look like what the text says they look like. Personally, I think they detract from the text rather than add to it. If I want to look up a species of fish, there are other books and websites for that. I do have an imagination, after all. I might not have minded so much if the photos were full color. In the ARC I was reading, the images are all black and white. Surely they'll be in color in the final copy? 
 Of course, complaints about the dialogue style or illustrations don't really apply to the actual plot or character development. But again, the story fell flat for me. If all the glowing Goodreads reviews are any indication, I'm really in the minority with this opinion. But I thought the book was alternately boring/pretentious and playing things up for the shock value. Abusive and absent parents? Check. Inappropriate underage sexual activity? Check. Precocious child who suffers but still manages to be plucky and teach us all a moral lesson? Check. 
 There's just something about this book that takes itself too seriously, which ironically makes it hard for me to take it seriously. I guess I just don't "get" whatever qualities this book has that makes it appealing to so many other reviewers. There's nothing definitively bad about it, but Aquarium is just not for me.