A review by purplemoonmyst
Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

adventurous dark tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Into the Drowning Deep was the first book in months that held my attention. It took getting Covid to realize that at this point in my life, I really and honestly did not care about personal development as I did before. I could read every single book, but at the end of the at, I have a severe mental illness and trust me when I say almost zero books deal with ways to cope if you are Nero divergent. I finally got fed up, then. Instead, I found myself craving stories and not just any ole story. I have found my way back to my sci-fi and speculative fiction. I found that I craved those kinds of stories. Mira Grant has written Into the Drowning Deep, and she has written many books that I love. And she wrote about ZOMBIES! I know I am wired for wanting to read allll the zombie books. I discovered Max Brook in college, and I have read every single story he has written, and I LOOOOVE them! Mira Grant also writes about zombies (hello, Newsflesh), and she is one of my favorite authors. I mean, she is on the tippy top along with Max Brooks. So when I found myself in a slump, I told myself to hell with self-development I am just going to read some sci-fi and Zombie stories. That, my friend, is how I decided to use Into the Drowning Deep to break out of the” slump” I found myself in. I say slump, but it turned out that my brain was begging NO MORE SELF-DEVELOPMENT SHIT PLS!!

In a nutshell, this is about killer mermaids. However, this is not your typical Mermaid story. Grant is excellent at how she gives just enough info to keep reading, and when all is revealed, you will be surprised. Plot Twist, indeed.

There were a couple of places where I had to suspend my belief a little more than I liked, but the rest of the story holds up, so it is all good. There was a deaf girl who had a submissle or something. I went allllll the way to the bottom of the challenger Seep, and part of me wanted to call bullshit because there is nothing that I know of that can have that much weight on it and still stay intact. Still, as I am not in the mood to try to dig through equations and the like, I just let it go and enjoyed the rest of the story.

What thrilled me the most was that Rolling in the Deep had a bit of diversity. It’s not all that obvious, but for some reason, every (it feels like) horror or sci-fi book I like always seems to center on white males. I mean, look at Ringworld. That is one of the fave books of my LIFE, yet no natural diversity that I remember. And no, I will not put it in this review because I want to encourage people to READ the book and not just copy what a book blogger said.

I want to touch on the deaf twins In the book. As a Deaf Person myself, I was thrilled that Grant wrote in one of the deaf twins to be the one to go down in the submersible to get a look at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, much farther than anyone else has reached. I am like, holy shit, Grant wrote decent Deaf characters. The kind that doesn’t need saving because they have their damn degrees and are not interested in finding a man to balance out her “disability” Let me stop here a sec and warn you. Suppose you ever meet a Deaf person, especially one from Gallaudet. In that case, you need to stop thinking about being handicapped because some people (including me) will do you worse than the giant-ass queen monster in Challenger Deep. That said, treat us like we have half a brain, and all will be well.