A review by ambermoony
A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

dark emotional hopeful medium-paced

3.0

okay first of all I thought the audiobook narrator was great, I really liked her performance. I really liked the setting! I thought the worldbuilding was pretty solid and the descriptions of all the locations were nice and evocative. I think the SA storyline was well-handled for the most part.

The romance was sweet enough but felt quite rushed, or maybe the writing just didn't give the best idea of the passage of time.
every time either of the characters professed that they'd wanted each other for such a long time I was just like. it has been like a couple weeks at most what are you talking about.


The prose is quite lovely but it does start to feel repetitive and kind of tedious at a point. There are only so many sea metaphors and similes you can make and ways to describe the exact same emotions over and over I suppose.

I don't always mind when a story is predictable but here it largely makes the characters come off as frustratingly stupid when I'm supposed to believe they're both clever.

The fact that Myrrdin's wife wrote the book is obvious from the moment the question of authorship is raised, okay, but the way they completely dismiss the widow and never seem to deem her worthy of looking into, that the possibility the woman in the photos could be his wife never seems to even cross their minds, that they never consider, especially after Effie's heartbreak over the possibility that a misogynist wrote the book, that maybe a woman wrote Angharad- it is all just kind of ludicrous. it could have tied perfectly into the themes of women being ignored and not listened to or believed- and how even the protagonists themselves fall into that trap!!- but it's never really addressed that way and the main characters are never criticised for it. And I just think that's a waste that makes the twist feel even more poorly executed.


stories where the protagonist is doubting their perception of reality can make for a tricky balance to strike. in this case I wasn't sure whether or not the author wanted the reader to genuinely doubt that supernatural elements were real
, but for me it was always obvious that they were. I think Effie's struggle between believing in what she was seeing vs what other people told her was real worked very well early on but it got to a point where she was ping-ponging back and forth between total belief and complete (and sometimes seemingly quite baseless) doubt got to feel a little frustrating and, again, repetitive
. 

Overall this book started off promising and I certainly don't think it's bad, but at a certain point I was just kind of waiting for it to be over :(


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