This is one of those novels I kept going back and forth on whether I wanted to read it – beautiful cover, epistolary novel, mystery – all of these sounded like elements I’d be into. On the other hand, reviews were generally positive but overly so and I didn’t know anyone personally that had read it that I could use as a gage.
But I finally decided to dive in (pun intended), and this could have been a pass. It’s not horrible, there are some interesting ideas, nice characters but the pacing is off. From early on, it’s one of those where I would sometimes wonder, “wait, how am I only this far in, I have been reading for a while.” But being a bit slow moving or a slow read is fine. Sometime after the halfway mark I just entirely lost my patience with the pacing, the lack of anything and the novel started feeling like homework and overly tedious. It does pick back up slightly, and then ends with a letter from the least enjoyable character in the novel, so whatever upswing it might have had is promptly destroyed. I have read a few other “first in a series” novels this year, ones that left me in no rush to get the sequel (I still might eventually read the second part to A Fate Inked in Blood) but I can definitively say, I don’t intend to read the second novel for this one. I tried finding some spoiler reviews but even with spoilers, they were a bit light on details.
The novel is set in a fantasy world that is primarily water based – some of this information is just kind of dropped randomly in passing but basically, there seems to only be one large actual land-mass in this world, everyone else seems to live in some type of floating cities or anchored cities on the water, and then you have the Deep House, a home built on the ocean floor where E and her two siblings grew up with their parents.
The novel begins about a year (they say a year but I think the timeline is a little vague/undefined, and there were a few points where I don’t think the speed of the letters arriving matched up with the events of the story) after E and her suitor Henerey have disappeared in some unexplained quake that took out the Deep House. E’s younger sister Sophy reaches out to Henerey’s brother Vyerin with a proposal – to share the letters their two siblings exchanged as they got to know each other and developed their relationship to understand more about them and what was happening before the event, and see more of their siblings in writing as a way to deal with their grief.
We get quite a few letters between Sophy and Vyerin throughout the novel as they become friends in their shared grief – in fact, I think we might have more letters between them than E and Henerey. Sophy and Vyerin also end up adding additional surrounding correspondence to the scope of their exchange since it will help provide context … what this means is that in addition to getting Henerey and E’s letters and a few sporadic diary entries of Henerey, Sophy also shares the mail she and E exchanged during this timeframe since Sophy was away on a scientific mission. Surely that mission will have no relevance to the bigger mystery of the disappearance (oh wait, we’ve all read books before) nor the weird Structure E noticed in their “backyard” (or whatever you call it when it’s below ocean property).
The biggest problem, I think, is that all the parts didn’t come together in a way that worked. Do you want to be an epistolary romance set in a magical world? I could read something light and fun. Do you want to have some huge mystery that is driving the narrative and could shake the foundations of everything this society is based on? I’ll take that. What doesn’t work is when you start off primarily as the first but decide there isn’t enough plot there so add sprinkles of the second approach in throughout without creating any sense of urgency around the question, don’t resolve any of it, and instead it makes the pacing feel extra off because maybe there is a mystery but we aren’t going to get to it. Also all these letter writers are so long winded (pot, kettle), and spend so much time describing their surroundings etc and yet the world building is pretty minimal: Academic politics, idealist scholars, water, got it.
