Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - A Study in Drowning

this book was very disappointing to me. i have read part of juniper and thorn by this author, and i finished the wolf and the woodsman, which i have moderate affection for simply because of the magic system and mythology. when i was looking for something new to read, i gave this a try. i did end up finishing it but it was a very close dnf. this was marketed as "dark acacdemia", which was completely incorrect, and it should have been marketed as a romance with academic and fantasy undertones.
the thing that bothers me a lot about reid's writing is that she has a very distinct style and interest that comes through in every book i have read by her: she has a huge interest in exploring misogyny and the way that women are exploited and oppressed, and a huge interest in discussing the way different hostile cultures interact with each other during some kind of wartime or industrial development between countries. now, i can see the merit of these topics. i myself have been on the receiving end of discrimination based on gender in the past as a transgender man. but...every single man in these stories except for the very best of them - the love interest - are predatory and terrifying to the very juvenile and immature young female protagonist. i found the protagonist of this story to be very uninteresting. her experiences deal mainly with being exploited by the men in her life, with no meaningful friendships outside of that, and when she does begin a friendship with someone, it's a man! and this young man she is friends with is now portrayed as the only good man. he respects her and thinks all other men are disgusting for what they've done, he is seen as this absolute paragon of goodness, and she automatically, immediately, has feelings for him, despite her past experiences. she seems to be fixed by her relationship with this young man despite everything else that has been done to her. and despite the fact that she has been sexually abused and harassed in the past by older men, she is extremely sexually attracted to this young man, and the story barely addresses the intricacies of her experience with that. it completely undermines the message of this story, which is about how women are mistreated in academic fields that are dominated by men!
now, to address the other part of my problem with this story -- this book is not the greatest offender of this crime that reid has written. i would say that the wolf and the woodsman is worse about this. this romance takes place between this young woman and this young man during a time of war between their two countries. there are interesting ways to handle this, certainly, but instead, the author chooses to use xenophobia as a bargaining chip in the banter between these characters. the young woman frequently insults the young man's heritage and call him borderline slurs based on his country of origin, and while he rarely rises to the bait and insults her back, he forgives her every time. his offense is to insult the magical religion of her country by being an academic skeptic, which is, in my opinion, really not the same. magic in this book is an extremely nebulous concept.
the fact that i gave it a whole three stars is me making a concession for this story. i thought the atmosphere and general plot of the book was very interesting and engaging. the worldbuilding was well done. the writing was not bad, it was just stylized and overly flowery and repetitive in places that i found to be very annoying. the emotional core of this story was affecting to be sure, i teared up slightly at the end, but i also saw the different twists coming from a mile away - literally from 20% into the book i knew how it was going to end. i also do not want this to be taken as me insulting the themes of misogyny and xenophobia. those are topics that can be explored extremely well in other places, but the nuance given to those topics here was incredibly poor and lacking in many ways. i do not recommend this book but i wanted to write down my thoughts on it anyway.

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samsbookcorner's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Genuinely my #1 complaint about this book as that I can't read the next one until next year!! I always struggle to find a reason to annotate books, but with this one I truly couldn't put the pen down.

Content Warnings