“But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that which despises you, that which terrifies you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.”

A Study in Drowning tells the story of Effy Sayre and her escapism from the real world through the pages in Angharad.
An architectural contest connected to the author of Angharad has her second guessing everything she thought she knew and believed to be true.

Let me start by saying: I took this entire read as a whole metaphor for mental health & the ways in which it can distort the way we see reality.

Is that the cynicism in me, mirroring Preston’s way of making sense of the world? Not wanting to believe in magic and folklore.
Or is that my way of surviving, like Effy, trying to find solace in words on a page that reflect my thoughts back to me?

I do know that this book swallowed me up like the sea and it’s the first book in a while that made me think so deeply ..
I know now why people love dark academia so much; It’s eerie & breath taking and beautiful.
I’d also forego sneaker purchases for a year just to be able to get my lil hands on an actual copy of Angharad in all it’s glory.

I went back & forth between a four and five star rating but ultimately decided on four stars. The authorship of Angharad felt predictable to me and the Fairy King plotline felt rushed & anticlimactic at the end.

Overall, I think the deeper plots of sexism in academia, triggers after trauma, mental health and female empowerment were so wonderfully written. This is the kind of book I know I’ll want to reread a few times just so I can take something new from it after every new read.

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