A review by danaslitlist
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

fast-paced

1.0

A thesaurus word vomit and body horror do not a book make. 

When I say that I made it an hour and some minutes in (roughly 50% of the book) without knowing what the hell was happening, who anyone was, or what this world looked like I wish I was exaggerating. I lost count of how many times I audibly asked “WHAT IS HAPPENING” because I quite literally don’t know what is happening on page. No, seriously. I don’t know what happened in this book other than a mermaid eating people and a Plague Doctor wanting to save kids who don’t want to be saved. 

Which for a novella is honestly shocking and telling. Part of this stems from lack of clear motives or thought behind anything these characters are doing while the other part comes from the extreme lack of anything about the characters themselves.

Some of the questions I have for this book (“some” being the keyword because I’m sure there’s more).

How does the magic work? Who is this cult? Where did the plague doctor come from? Why are they with the mermaid? How come the mermaid is okay with leaving her children? Where are they? Is this a made up world or is supposed to be in our world? Who is the authority figure? If the mermaid married a prince is she a princess? What is she the princess of? 

I understand the authors intention of spreading out the “backstory” (that’s being generous) of the unnamed main character much later in the book but it was detrimental to the story. Why? Because, it leaves the readers without any understanding, without a name to call her, without an idea of what direction we’re going. And because this is such a short book that’s all information that the readers should have much earlier or at least had breadcrumbs to follow.

This is supposed to be a little mermaid retelling, that’s one of the reasons I requested an ARC, but when I got approved and started listening I had completely forgotten that’s what this was. And continued to read the rest of the novella without realizing once what this was supposed to be. “Retelling” translates to “eh it has a prince and a mermaid, and she lost her voice but that’s not the focus on the book and in fact takes a backseat to whatever is going on with the Plague Doctor and a cult.”


The prose was also very difficult to follow or lose yourself in. This is a book that says so so so little with so so so many words. We are given a display of pretentious descriptions and dialogue, which always leaves me feeling rude to say, but in this case it needs to be said. I would like to consider myself a pretty well read person and I’m not afraid or ashamed to admit that I will google words if I don’t know them. However when you use 50 SAT words in a row for no other reason than to sound smart or fancy, it’s exhausting. I shouldn’t have to stop reading a 2 hour book every few minutes to go look up words. Especially when it’s not necessary, it’s just a style choice.

I’m not squeamish when it comes to body horror and so that element of the book didn’t bother me. But it sadly fell short on delivering any real horror due to the repetitive nature of events. How many times can she say “marrow”, “bezoar”, vivisection”, “viscera”, and “calcium”? Too many times that’s the answer.

The idea of man eating mermaid monster is great, I’m just going to need more than the same descriptions for how she picked apart bodies and ate the tendons and flesh. 

I saw a lot of reviews saying that this is a haunting or vivid or unsettling. I wish I had any of those feelings for this book. It was flat, overdone, and lacking any meaning besides the utterly shoehorned “men fear the voices of things they don’t understand.” Which is a great statement just wish it had any relevance to the rest of the book.

Perhaps this novella would’ve been better off as a longer book so we could explore the present while also getting more flashbacks over time in order to help us not feel so disjointed or confused. But then I would’ve had to sit through a longer version of this book.
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