My niece turned 6 in September and according to her mum (my brother's other half) all she desired was this "moxie girl mermaid doll". You can hardly turn on Nick Jr channel without an advert going past and these girls pop up so I am not surprised she wanted one! I went to my local Toys R us and it was a neverending saga bringing my daughter with me as she then of course decided she wanted one too. So I ended up well out of pocket buying 2 at the price of £19.99 each. The joy of having kids!

The doll of course comes packaged in a cardboard box with a clear plastic cover to see it in all it's glory. The doll itself is a flexible mermaid type doll which has a stiff upper half and the "tail" so to speak is encased in a purple glittery gel type material and I can feel about 3 creases where the lower half can bend so as to enable the doll to swim freely in the water. She requires 2 x AAA batteries and this is supposedly already included in the doll.

The advert's selling point of these dolls is that as soon as you put them in water they swim like a mermaid. Cool right?! Well no. Seeing as, as soon as I put my daughter's one out the box (which was a lot easier said than done as usual with these toys) she of course wanted to try her out. So we ran her a bath, and both my daughter and Kellan (name of the moxie girl mermaid) hopped in the bath. I am still waiting to see her thrash around like a mermaid, she did nothing but float on top of the water looking lifeless! Very disappointed for my 20 quid!

So I decided to do some investigating and to put batteries in requires the smallest imaginable screwdriver to remove part of our lovely mermaids back. Turns out there are no batteries and my lovely box lied to me. Luckily she has so many toys that require all sorts and sizes of batteries so we had some at home already. These were easily inserted and the back screwed back together nicely. Hoorah! let's get playing again! Popping her in the bath the tail does make a mild swishing movement but to say she "swims" is a bit of an exaggeration if you ask me!

Overall my daughter is happy with her doll as she is with pretty much anything "princess" related and to her a moxie girl is just a swimming barbie and another friend for her to have in the bath lol. I have now seen these selling in argos for £15.99 and amazon retail it for £24.40 which I think is just extortionate. Moxie Girlz do a wide range of dolls so I definitely think this is a case of paying for the name much more than the quality of the doll as I don't think she was worth £20 at all. Least they could do is include the batteries really!