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I always hated being by the water, even before I drowned in 1851.
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC of this book
Tidepool takes place in a coastal city in 1913 where mysterious things occur. When her brother goes missing, Sorrow Hamilton (yes, that's her name) goes to the town to try and find him and well ... she finds some other things.
The book certainly starts off strong, it has a very captivating first chapter and the premise of a creepy "fishy" story. I liked the setting and how tangible the whole atmosphere is and I really like the couple of chapters that were set in the past to provide some sort of backstory. It's quick to read and captivating enough to keep you going. However, I felt the book shows its hand pretty early on and then really struggles with finding its voice and committing to it.
The characters and the dialogues all felt very flat to me. Sorrow is a 21 year old who sounds a lot like a teenager and doesn't really have a whole lot of personality, to be honest. I was disappointed that a book centered around two core sibling relationships is so quick to brush over both of these bonds and offers only a surface-level view of it all. Sorrow disobeys her father and travels to Tidepool to find her brother but when she gets her answers, she shows almost no emotion? Her discovery has almost no psychological effect on her (unless you count the very last few pages which ... more on that later). A lot of the drama felt manufactured, the characters have to leave town but then, for some random reason, they decide to stay or they decide to do something else first that prevents them from leaving town or, ... the main goal is always to leave town and I understand that in classic storytelling the whole structure tells you to present the characters with obstacle after obstacle but these obstacles are supposed to increase in intensity and to kind of make sense; here, most of it really feels unnatural.
Another issue I had with the story was that, as I mentioned, it reveals the mystery really early on (we know part of it by the end of the very short first chapter and the rest that is revealed pretty soon after is not that much of a question mark). The main plot here is to see if Sorrow leaves town as we know the whole town mystery before she knows (and she finds out most of it pretty soon, as I said). Since we've seen the "monster" at the start, the story loses this element of suspense and wonder which I think that, such a unique type of monster, could have been a huge asset to use.
Lastly, I may be nitpicking now but the story ends a good 50-60 pages before the actual end. There's not much to keep reading for and yet there are chapters after chapters of epilogue that really could have been simplified or just foregone altogether.
Overall, I liked the premise and I think there was a lot of potential here but, ultimately, I see this mostly as a 2.5 star read. It's good enough but it could have been so much better.