Reviews with content warning for Terminal illness - Our Wives Under The Sea

Reviews tagging 'Terminal illness'

Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

119 reviews

fatherprozac's review against another edition

challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

This reminded me so much of "The Rememberer" by Amiee Bender, one of my favorite short stories. Unfortunately, as a long form novel, I did not enjoy this as much.

I thought the amount of mystery and sinister secret society stuff was just right. The "boss" with his eye ring, the eye of the creature, the disappearance of the Centre--all of it made my stomach drop when the connections started appearing. I like that we don't get the full picture; what would you want to know? That there's a group sending sacrifices down to an ancient creature that is the ocean itself? I think it works much better unclear and up to your imagination.

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theirgracegrace's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I read this book in a whirlwind three weeks and I cannot get it out of my head. The pastiche of character moments (especially at the end) can come across as jarring but helps to solidify the main characters Miri and Leah. Their relationship deteriorates when Leah comes back "wrong" after a routine research trip in a submarine leaves her stranded on the ocean floor for six months. The point-of-view bounces between Miri trying to make sense of her wife's strange behaviour and Leah explaining how the trip might have purposefully done for some mysterious ends. A tragic ending puts this book high on my list of recommended books. A fantastic read!

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rachel_hoey's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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eva_hihi_'s review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

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

5.0

Beatifully written, ripped my heart out, made me want to find a wife and settle down
Also made me more afraid of the ocean than I already was

Part of this book is how Miri deals with her wife's dissapearance. And that part especially spoke to me since I also have a friend who vanished. How in the beginning you act like everything's fine and don't worry that much bc there are loads of reasons why someone could be missing, it doesn't have to mean something horrible happened. How at some point you kinda assume they're dead bc it's easier but at the same time you can't get yourself to truely believe it.

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kaiju_krispies's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book is about a lot of things, but for me, it is primarily about the inextricable, inevitable relationship between grief and love. And like the book, I am left more with a series of impressions more than a concrete understanding of what happened here.

I'm a sucker for openers, the first fifty pages of a book to me are often my favorite; this is the rare one where it starts strong and just keeps getting better. I think the author is extremely clever in how and when we are fed a change of pace, a glimpse backward in time, or a grotesque new image. Prescient, also, to have written a book about the horrors of submarines in the deep ocean.

I spent most of the book feeling just slightly too stupid to gather all of the presented threads and tie them into a whole message. I can see the threads--the question mark of Miri's genetic illness and the pretending that we don't know what's going to happen even when we do, that grief is a ghost made vivid by memory more than it is about a person, that love is a void into which we stare and we are transformed by that love into something beautiful, grotesque, and impermanent--but I can't, quite, wrestle them into a whole, complete thought. This also feels right, because nothing about grief or love ever was just one thing. The night I finished it I cried to myself to sleep about my dog growing old, and in me is also the child crying for their old cat and only friend the night he died, and these are the same gritty pearl in the same body made different by time.

A book to read twice, but maybe not too close together, and an author to look out for. There were so many pitfalls here--over-flowery language, growing maudlin, making a thread too obscure or too obvious, revealing too much or too little, even letting the reader know it's okay that you know where this is going now, that's what a monster movie is--and by my reckoning they were all gracefully avoided. I cannot imagine what editing this was like. I appreciate being taken along on this story and will think about it for a long time to come.

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