Review by stripes_and_naps - Somewhere Beyond the Sea

stripes_and_naps 's review for:

Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune

2.5

hopeful slow-paced

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

I really wanted to love this book, because I enjoyed the first one. Unfortunately I really struggled to finish it. A few of the issues I had were that the stakes never felt high enough, it felt more like a lecture than a story where the morals are shown rather than told, and the secondary villain felt like a half-baked copy of Umbridge.

I also did not like that the main villain was based on JKR. While I do not support her work due to her harmful stances, reading a character so obviously based on her took me out of the story and to me is giving her more power than she deserves.

Things that I liked were the normalization of queer characters, and the dynamics between the family. I feel like this book had a lot of potential but in the end it just wasn’t it for me.

Content Warnings