Review by abmalada - A Sea of Unspoken Things

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abmalada 's review for:

A Sea of Unspoken Things by Adrienne Young

3.75

emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This one was a little disappointing to me because I typically love Adrienne Young’s books and this fell a little flat for me. A Sea of Unspoken Things is less magical and more reflective than The Unmaking of June Farrow and Spells for Forgetting. The premise is that James’ (our FMC) twin brother has died and she is returning to her small hometown to investigate his death and all the skeletons that get unearthed as a result.

Does that sound familiar? It’s very much like Spells for Forgetting, except James is August handling his mother’s post-mortem affairs and Micah is Emery dealing with the lost love coming home.

I love magical realism, but I wish this book had been more paranormal. The magical part comes from James’ extraordinary soul-connection to her brother, Johnny, to the point that she is getting visions of his life. If I’m being honest, I thought at first that she was just exaggerating the twin-bond joke and it took me a while to come around mentally to it. I also felt like I didn’t know Johnny at all (well, he is dead, to be fair) but despite James’ unreliableness as a narrator when it comes to her brother, for how much Johnny plays a part in this story, I didn’t feel like I connected to him as a character well. I’m going to give a little slack to Young on this point though, because the whole point of the book was James dealing with her grief and not knowing Johnny as well as she thought she did. He was meant to be an enigma.

Ultimately, this book was a little bit to slow-paced for me. Young is a queen of writing atmospheric, reflective fiction but it took me a little bit to get into this story.

Content Warnings