Reviews

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

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nickel_books's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious fast-paced

4.5

Didn't know I needed this reimagining of The Little Mermaid, but I most certainly did! At the center of a tale dripping in blood and violent rituals of making and unmaking is a love story of sorts. Khaw continues to use beautiful prose to describe horrific - and ultimately human - things.

Content Warnings

michaelklam's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

3.5

markshenoda's review

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3.0

I have no idea what happened.

What's with the fancy wordy word?! I have a theory.

The writer works in gaming, right? What if they wanted to add an interactive element to their books by adding 2 dollar words so that you have to click on your Kindle screen a lot to see what the hell that word meant.

wittchyn's review against another edition

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3.0

I have always been really interested in the mermaid-type mythos where flesh eating plays a big part. I think this could have been really good as a side-story to a larger novel about the mermaid herself.

My main problem with this, and the reason why I didn't give it a higher rating, was because of the vocabulary. I understand the anatomical terms, but there are a lot of other unnecessarily high level words (some used not quite correctly) that make this incredibly dense and—honestly—unpleasant to read.

I don't think Khaw should dumb down their language, so to speak, but imo it would help a lot to make their stories more approachable and memorable in a good way if it didn't feel like they were trying to impress someone with how long they spent in a thesaurus.

Otherwise, I very much enjoy how Khaw doesn't shy away from writing the gruesome. I really wish the word usage didn't put me off from reading the rest of their works.