A review by alexisvana
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

I'm SO in the minority for pretty much every part of my review, but here goes...

  • I think the writing style (i.e. prioritizing poetic/lyrical prose over like... baseline plot development) actually mostly worked for me, I'm shocked! There were a couple times where I highlighted lines because I thought "hmmm... this line sounds pretty, but it doesn't make a lick of sense" but aside from that, I generally enjoyed it
  • Don't care about the second person narrative in this context. For me, this very rarely works for my brain in novels/memoirs and I don't really understand what purpose it was serving here
  • I think the plot of the first 70% of this read like an episode of 'Friends' in that... I feel like we were romanticizing deeply problematic/toxic behavior. I think 5-10 years ago I would've been absolutely swooning but now I'm like "damn, I would've dumped BOTH of you a long time ago" lol
  • In general, I think there was far too little character development for this to be moving for me. I'm walking away knowing next to nothing about our main characters other than they are presumably very hot and drink pretty much constantly

Not mad I read it, but I think it should've just been a poem or a novella - I think the lack of character devleopment/floofy writing style would've been much more successful if it were less drawn out.
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