Reviews with content warning for Ableism - Into the Drowning Deep

Reviews tagging 'Ableism'

Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

77 reviews

midnightcomets's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

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

5.0

Horrifying, deep and dark and deranged. I love this book. Into the Drowning Deep is a story about the darkness of the deep, the human tendency to always explore, and always try to conquer, and the hope that can be found even in the worst occassions. It is a tale about nature's power, about the unknown, about cryptids and monsters, whether imagined or real, and about how we always want to know, no matter the cost.

It is a story that I enjoyed cover to cover, that I read while in the sea on purpose, that made me shiver and shout and feel so many million things, and it is one of the best things I read this year, an absolute delight on so many levels. For fans of horror, please read it. For fans of the Vast in the Magnus Archives, please read it squared. For fans of the sea, and its delightful, fascinating secrets, this is going to be the best time in your life. Also, a lot of love and respect for the author and the research she put into this book. I learned so many new things, and it even made me see so many different angles on various issues.

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pages_with_panda's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark informative mysterious medium-paced

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

4.0

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shannasbooksnhooks's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

4.0

"'It's matching the sounds made by a human throat while completely submerged,' said Jillian. 'It shouldn't be able to do that. Human speech underwater doesn't sound like human speech. It sounds like something dead and drowned and distorted. Whether it's thinking about the adjustments or doing them automatically, it's matching something that shouldn't be able to match. That's incredible.'"
Can we say "perfect summer-to-autumn transition read"? I think we can. This book had just the right amount of summer (oceans, marine life, yachts, etc.) and autumn (mystery, suspense, death, etc.) vibes. This book did take a bit of time to pick up with the modern-day story, but once it did, it was so good. (Although, I will say the end of the epilogue confused me a bit. I had to read the last two chapters before the epilogue a couple of times, but even then I was confused. I think it was just the wording of it.) I did have a few issues with the book, which will be hidden due to spoilers. This book was, overall, a fun read despite my issues with it. And it was so interesting seeing all of the perspectives - not just humans, but mermaids and dolphins as well.

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molsreads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

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

4.25

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bookbunnie's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

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

4.5

Read this book if you love sea monsters, a plausible theory as to the biology of mermaids if they existed, and a diverse cast with clearly defined goals.

Do not read this book if you need a lot of character development, are looking for a more traditional mermaid, or aren’t interested in a battleground of science.

I loved this book and didn’t want it to end. The cast of characters held my interest and I enjoyed how their turn on the page gave a concise slice of their worldview, goals, and personality. It was really fun to watch all these scientists put things together to try and figure out how the mermaids worked. I am definitely not a marine biologist or scientist in any capacity, but I like when things make sense, and the science in the book felt plausible enough to me as a layperson that I was like “damn yeah maybe that IS how they would work.”

The climax was a little underwhelming, I would have liked to see more of the *finale,* but it wasn’t as long and drawn out to me as a lot of actiony books are, so it didn’t ruin the book for me.

I wouldn’t shut up about mermaids the entire time I was reading this. It was so fun, one of my favorite books that I’ve read this year!

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mimeflower's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny lighthearted mysterious tense fast-paced

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

4.75

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gbeezz's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

4.25

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yuna's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

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

3.5

Minor spoilers in the cw.

Another review called this Jurassic Park but with mermaids and the vibe is very similar. It's scary at times, fun at others, and gets very actiony.

I liked this for the most part, but was a little underwhelmed by the ending. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but seeing as this book spent so much time showing the collision of human hubris and arrogance, I didn't really like any of the characters by the end (even Dr. Toth, who I liked for the most part a lot).

I was hoping they'd all die again like in the prequel

.

There are some weird POV scenes and brief conflict points that felt like they stuck out (and were concluded abruptly), like

the dolphin POV or the 'Tory is a suspect! Wait, no she's not'

. It's also really wordy. I liked the science and range of POVs for the most part, but in some places the descriptions of the science and the politicking that goes with it started to feel redundant.

Something I missed from the prequel was having a crew member be a prominent POV character. The crew is largely absent from this (arguably, we have the two engineer guys, but they're not on the same level as the captain/first mate from the prequel) and they came across as not very serious, almost blundering.

All that said, this feels like it would make a good movie as film could cut down some of the verbosity, and the horror moments are good.

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced

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

2.0

Very few things in books have made me as irritated as this exchange (edited slightly for brevity):

"If they have a language -- not just one language, but two languages, one spoken and one not -- and if the complexity of their spoken language is anything like the complexity of their singing, they must be sentient."
"Cats meow and know what they're saying. Birds sing. That doesn't make them smart."
"There's a lot of difference between a song that basically says, 'Hey, come fuck me' over and over again and a distinct, signed language."

Let's unpack some of this!

1) Sentience =/= (human-like) intelligence. Most animals are recognized as sentient beings; this is the entire point of animal welfare.
2) There are some debates around applying labels of intelligence to animals, but since it seems mostly accepted in this setting that animals (like dolphins) are capable of intelligence, it is very widely studied and accepted, even beyond deeply scientific spheres (thus not even really justifying the character without a background in science expressing this view), that birds* possess some level of quantifiable intelligence.
3) If it is specifically on the basis of "distinct language"**, many bird species do in fact use this, and not just for mating calls! Even if you look beyond stereotypically smart corvids and parrots, who are famously capable of mimicking human speech, plenty of birds have complex call/song systems to indicate danger (for instance, chickadees have varying calls depending on the exact predator they've spotted) and other purposes.

* I'm ignoring cats as an example because I don't know enough to counter that, but I'm sure saying they're not smart is not true either.
** This seems weird in and of itself when most animal intelligence surveys focus on memory, reasoning, learning ability, tool use, etc, but communication can be studied as a signifier of intelligence so I won't nitpick it as hard.

The lack of cursory research in this very basic area -- not to mention frequent references to "us," implying modern primates, "leaving/coming from the sea," with continuous implications that such an exit was because of a humanoid competitor, which just shows a poor understanding of evolution all around (especially when the character saying it has multiple biology degrees), and some other nitpicks (like forgetting the existence of lungfish) -- stripped any interest I otherwise would have had in various other scientific tangents, since I was no longer confident enough in the author's knowledge to trust her descriptions. The hard sci-fi angle feels (if you'll excuse the slight pun) shallow, with the author seemingly wanting to skate by on an introductory biology course and artistic license. To be fair, with speculative fiction some suspension of disbelief is always required -- but if your setting is an explicitly realistic, grounded one filled with ostensibly intelligent, educated scientists, of course I'm going to expect super simple scientific facts to be portrayed accurately.

Though that bit and others alone certainly soured my reading experience, I had a multitude of other problems, to the point where I waffled for a while between 1 and 2 stars for my rating. Ultimately, I suppose I can see where others might enjoy the novel, so I left it at the latter, but it's certainly not a higher-leaning 2 as other books might have been for me.

First and foremost: The writing. Listen, I will cop to the fact that I'm a pretentious person whose writing is reasonably pretentious, but there is a natural level of pretentiousness and then a tryhard one. This is the latter. It, in line with its confidently spoken but dubiously accurate scientific tangents, tries so hard to be smart and unique that it wraps back around into being insufferable to read. More than a few lines seem to be written just to be quotable and poetic, since in context they're jarringly out of place -- notably, one description of a bulge in a character's pocket as, instead of just belonging to the gun he has on him, "[speaking] of gunfire and violence." The dialogue in particular is stilted and weird and very far from natural human speech, which is kind of ironic considering how crucial a theme communication is. In general, the purple prose Grant weaves is, while superficially elegant, against the purpose of the novel: A thriller fundamentally does not work when there's enough breathing room to drag out extensive descriptions and work in paragraphs of background information and introspection on the characters and their lines of work.

As for those characters, I found them painfully uninteresting and difficult to connect to. Stories like this, where anyone can, at least in theory, die, require that kind of investment -- a character death is, to me, meaningless if it provokes no particular emotion. Character backstories are fleshed out to an almost unnecessary degree, and yet I couldn't tell you who most of the characters were as people, what their interests (beyond, in many cases, science) were, what their defining personality traits were. Characterization depends more on what the story needs than what actually fits the character's personality or feels like something an actual human would do, resulting in a lot of questionable and outright idiotic decisions. Some secondary characters are only introduced after the 70% mark, and others only shortly before then, when the action requires their existence. Other characters disappear for chapters on end or full stop, their final fate a mystery. Nothing is done to distinguish different characters' narration (which is presented in third-person omniscient already, another strike against attempted suspense) or dialogue; if you struck names and some descriptions from the dolphins' brief perspective, it would blend in seamlessly with every other PoV.

It's also difficult to react to character deaths when none of the in-universe reactions are especially strong. An exploration of different expressions of grief -- and the complications that would lead to when action was necessitated -- could have fit in really neatly and not disrupted too badly from the plot, but emotional beats are given very little time to linger before pushing onto the next sequence, leading to weird moments that don't fit into the current stakes or tone at all. One could argue that few characters are given the time to process matters and react appropriately, and of course there's no one right way to respond to bereavement, but when the reactions are lackluster all across the board -- with one or two notable exceptions -- that doesn't hold up as well. Deceased characters are also rarely acknowledged after the fact, with even Tory's sister, whose pre-novel death drives her motivation, only coming up in critical moments.

The pacing, in general, was pretty poor. At least 40% of the novel could have been trimmed out to its benefit -- it takes a while for the plot to really kick in, and then it drags on for a long time only to rush into its ending. Some character/setting details don't come up until they're absolutely necessary, leading to a couple of deus ex machina moments rather than more reasonable foreshadowing. The final major reveal comes across as contrived at best, and an ass-pull contradictory to former established facts at worst, with some prior sprinklings of hints but nothing strong enough to really justify it as a proper conclusion, and things wrap up without properly resolving either the plot as a whole or any characters' lives.

Some character dynamics were interesting -- Jillian and Theo's, for instance, as well as Tory and Luis's friendship, and as unlikable as both individuals were there was a certain intrigue to Jacques and Michi's relationship -- but the forced romantic subplot was not one of them. The first two interactions between Tory and Olivia have them on hostile terms; after starting to resolve their differences, their very next interaction establishes infatuation with no lead-in or room to develop. Their relationship itself forms awkwardly and under odd circumstances, and how underdeveloped they both are as characters eroded any potential for chemistry.

As for the actual plot, it was fine -- a bit too close to a corny Syfy movie in some places, but I did like the basic ideas and some developments as well as the multimedia format used in between parts (however grating some of the actual content thereof was). Even if it was handled poorly, I liked the basic gist of the ultimate twist, and in general felt like the sirens -- the very central point of the novel -- were relegated to mere plot elements and not truly explored in as great detail as they could have been.

On the representation side of things: The three major characters of color, I felt, were depicted awkwardly at best. Whiteness is, overall, presented as the default in character descriptions, with characters of color quickly established as such but white characters pretty much never specified to be so. Furthermore, any cultural connection is stripped down to centuries-long whaling in Michi's family -- referenced as dubious motivation for her being a big game hunter who kills for the (sometimes explicitly sexual) thrill, things that go completely against traditional Japanese whaling values; historical whaling practices are not equivalent to the modern commercialized form thereof -- and Jillian's connection to the sea and appearance. Luis's Mexican heritage is only mentioned once or twice. Another major character has a Hebrew middle name, as revealed in one scene, but her religion/ethnicity are never really established outside of that. Though the setting isn't necessarily one that allows for extensive exploration of character backgrounds and habits, that doesn't seem to matter anywhere else, so some effort to acknowledge upbringing and language, if nothing else, could have at least been extended.

I found the disabled/neurodivergent representation more palatable, although I have my issues with it as well. While the basic mechanics of Theo's chronic illness and the Wilson twins' deafness are portrayed decently enough, at least the latter two and their older sister's characterizations seem to revolve around being d/Deaf, and around the hardships thereof by extension. Olivia being autistic, while adequately coded throughout (if a bit constrained to social difficulties and overlooking other traits), is also only explicitly mentioned when ableism faced from her parents is mentioned. Portraying ableism experienced, as well as difficulties of navigating an inherently inaccessible society, is obviously an important part of portraying disabled characters, but it can drag a bit to see disabled characters almost exclusively experiencing trauma and adversity. Speaking as an autistic and physically disabled person -- yes, being disabled is hard! Experiencing ableism is hard! But disabled lives are not composed entirely of strife and pain, and seeing some joy to offset the largely negative experiences would have helped a lot.
I was a bit uncomfortable with the descriptions of Holly's voice as well, which came across as varyingly infantilizing and dehumanizing, but I'm not d/Deaf/HoH so YMMV on that.

All in all, there are some strong ideas at play in Into the Drowning Deep, but unfortunately, in my eyes it fails as both science fiction and horror, with its many flaws detracting majorly from what positives it does have going for it.

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laurajones's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

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

4.0

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