sercem_w_ksiazkach's reviews
418 reviews

 the main character is a homophobic ass and such a selfish person. she makes her daughter's sexuality about herself, wondering how could this have happened to her. she calls her daughter's girlfriend "that girl" and only stops being outwardly bigoted when her daughter literally gets mauled in an anti-gay-rights protest. and even then she doesn't care for other people who got hurt, only about herself. reading about her irritated me and i don't see value in reading this book. i just hate redeeming deadbeat parents. and if i wanted to hear homophobic bullshit i would listen to my own parents or i'd pull out a pride flag or totebag in public 

loved this written so well

it was supposed to be shocking and disgusting and it definitely was disgusting. this is a diary of intrusive thoughts of a barmy lady that should have stayed inside her head tbh

i hated the narration, especially the breaking of the fourth wall. it was a messy book, neither an actual story of the (underdeveloped) characters nor a commentary on their actions or the publishing world. wanrted to shoot myself half the time and almost rolled my eyes out of my eyeballs the other times. hated the writing style.

 Wasn’t worth finishing but I'm finally freeeee

***

I need to be a hater for a solid minute.

God I was so BORED throughout this entire book. Legit fell asleep after 15 pages multiple times. I HATED the narration. I'm already not a fan of stream of consciousness type of narration but what is worse I disliked the characters. Miri's stream of consciousness included a total of four thoughts repeated for over 120 pages:
1. my wife is acting weird,
2. the TV at neighbors's apartment is loud,
3. my friends annoy me,
4. my dead mother... (thought unfinished).

Leah was fine. She had the marine biologist thing going for her, and that was the only vaguely interesting part of the book. All Miri did was complain. I felt like she disliked everyone, her friends and wife(!) included. I could not stand reading about her, because not only was she unlikeable, she was boring – and that's decidedly worse. She was also nonchalant about everything – her life, work, her friends' life, and what actually is going on with her wife. She looked at what she became and was unbothered.

I have no idea what the author was trying to do with this book. It is decidedly not a horror novel – only the concept is, really. It's not a thriller about a marine mission going wrong, because there's barely any tension. The most tense I felt was when I thought about the Centre where Leah worked at, which did not answer Miri's calls and was weirdly nonchalant and quiet about their research mission lasting not 3 weeks, but over 5 months. But honestly – that's business for you! It was yet another thing drowned in the sea of unimportance that almost every sentence of this book was.

I think that what the author was trying to do was describing the end of a relationship and the grief of it. The problem is that for this to work, the reader needs to believe the relationship.There was too little buildup of their relationship and too little feelings. We saw fleeting moments, and those moment were not enough to make me believe these women ever loved each other. Were attracted to each other and cared, sure, but sexual tension is not enough to build a story basen on a relationship.

There was too much distance between the reader and the characters and their feelings. Miri and Leah kept the reader at an arm's length, so I did not give two shits about them. They did not process their feelings themselves, so any metaphor about "grief weighting
on them like an ocean crushing a boat with of tons of water" or whatever was thinly weiled. The relationship between Miri and Leah felt surface-level. We barely knew anything about their relationship, and when we got to know, it was the end of the book already.

I did not think that the structure of two timelines worked for this book. We gradually got to know Leah and her relationship to Miri, however with Miri we're put in the present: her grieving her relationship with the woman she married.

But we did not know the woman she married. And it's hard to place ourselves in the shoes of Miri, a whiny woman who only complains and doesn't even seem to actually like her wife, much less love her. I couldn't care that she felt alone after her wife came back from the sea, because I didn't believe their relationship.

I like books that have no plot, just vibes. But this one did not even have the vibes.

What this book tried to be was a character-driven novel, but the characters were one-dimentional, annoying and boring. I would like it better if it was plot-driven, a thriller focusing on what actually went down under the sea. Perhaps with occasional chapters from Miri's point of view, an outsider's perspective to show how much time passes, a worried wife who starts to realize she might have lost the love of her life. Then it would be much more impactful.

I'm terribly disappointed that I didn't like this book. I was ready to love it – it had such an interesting premise, and it's sapphic. Unfortunately, the writing was absolutely not for me, and I could not stand Miri (who, I have a feeling, was probably author's self-insert). Biggest disappointment of the year. 

i'd add eugenics to trigger warnings bc there was a lot of discussion about it, challenged by the narrative

to my surprise, i highly enjoyed this. the writing was very vivid and the vibes immaculate

LOVE LOVE LOVE on page 15 I knew I'd be obsessed with this book and I am.