A review by invicticide
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

3.5

This is a book about love:

It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding, to pull it up to your chin like bedclothes and feel it settling around you as something true.

and loss:

I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.

Everything outside of Miri and Leah's relationship is vague, and there are lots of questions with very few concrete answers, because this isn't a story about solving the problem; it's a story about accepting what's happened. It's a slow and quiet meditation on grief, heavy on beautiful sentences and melancholic vibes, and light on action and plot.

The middle sags, and a couple things happen around 2/3 of the way in that miscued me into thinking we were going in a very different direction than we did. YMMV.

If you're currently dealing with grief or loss of your own, this book might hurt a lot to read. It might also help, a little, in the end.