Happy Release Day!
Heartbreaking and brilliant.

A deeply moving sapphic/queer love story set against the backdrop of WW2, told from the point-of-view of two Canadians struggling to find a place in the world and finding solace in each other.
The prose in this book was vivid and engrossing and the subject matter was often frustrating and sad. This author has a talent for writing deeply descriptive passages, action and emotion without superfluous language or detail.

The magical elements were sprinkled throughout and sometimes I wondered if they were truth, legend or it was an after affect of Kit’s almost drowning as a child. You will have to decide this for yourself, and I haven’t come to any conclusions of my own either. Perhaps Kit is a changeling descended from Selkies and there are fairies in the water, perhaps her oxygen deprived brain and imaginative mother merely convinced themselves of it. Regardless I found it fascinating.
I won’t do any plot summary here as the blurb is amazingly comprehensive and completely accurate.

Spoiler

One small note about the ending that I struggled with: it seemed very idealized, with Kit and Rebekah living an almost heteronormative life, raising Rebekah’s daughter. I want to believe that the glossing over of society’s inevitable push back on this was intentional. After reading some of the marketing and author’s notes, I believe it was. But I was left wondering why Kit never really expressed their feelings on this when in their pov. I finally resigned myself to believing that Kit would present themselves to the world how they wished, abandoning anyone who may have known them differently or who didn’t embrace them fully, in order to find any form of happiness at this time in history. So in that, this likely was the only way Kit and Rebekah could have happiness. But it was left very much open to reader interpretation. So I really had to embrace the ambiguity.

Don’t go into this thinking it’s a romance though, it’s not, it’s a story of struggle, survival and finally, hope.

Thank you to NetGalley for the copy and congratulations to Loghan Paylor for a brilliant debut novel.