A review by lillanaa
The Vanishing Deep by Astrid Scholte

3.0

This book was received as an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I went into this not really sure what exactly it was going to be. There's a lot of interesting teen media out there, but all of it generally feels very... Samey. It seems like everything's "chosen one" media, but this subverts that beautifully. Tempest and Elysea are both just... Teenagers. Trying their best. And while they're very good at what they do, and incredibly smart, they're not really special, which I'm oddly happy about.

This book, however, was... Interesting to me. It didn't pull punches, and the characters felt like actual characters.

Spoiler

At first I thought Nessandra was going to be more of a "villain" type character than she turned out to be, but her impact was larger than expected as well.

I wouldn't say I was a fan of everything that happened, there were a lot of parts that heavily dragged and things that seemed thrown in just because the writer thought it would be coll but never actually went anywhere.

All in all, not what I thought it would be. The writing was fine, but it was too ambitious. Things happened but then they... Didn't. If you like teen books, you'll probably like this. There was a bit of romance, but it felt forced, just like pretty well every other book of the genre.