I was quite excited to read this book, but it didn't meet my expectations completely.

Effy is an architecture student who is asked to work on redesigning an estate and travels to that estate to do work. The architecture part was something that made me want to read this book and I was disappointed by the lack of presence of that topic. It was way more focused on literature and it felt like there was barely any architecture talk at all. Therefore it felt unnecessary to me.

The world in the book sounded interesting and I was excited to learn more about the drownings, but I felt it was lacking in explanation. There's not a lot explained and also if it was explained, it was quite late in the book and that made it harder for me to get into the story in the beginning or understand certain decisions based on this world.

The story had a lot of aspects I was interested in, like the mystery around the author they're investigating and the story of the Fairy King. Also the estate itself and the town close to drowning was something that intrigued me.

In the end it felt like it had good potential. Certain world-building aspects could've been explained better and more. Perhaps a focus on just a few main aspects would've helped, since I felt some details of the plot felt too much and didn't add anything to the story for me (the romance for example didn't feel like something that added to the story at all and felt often ill-timed).