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A review by ryannrripley
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield
3.0
I was so excited to read this because I loved the premise. I was disappointed. The first half of the book is too slow. I can handle a slow burn if the prose is fire, but unfortunately, this book didn’t hit the sweet spot for me.
This story is about grief. Which is fine, and lovely and horrifying etc etc, but it didn’t have anything interesting to SAY about grief. And this is coming from me, someone who recently lost their mom and cut off all contact with their dad. If you want to write over a hundred pages of sadness about how losing your wife is like losing your parent, can those pages offer me something new? Or perhaps my own grief is just so different than the author’s grief that it is impossible to relate. I guess that felt alienating to me, to feel like I was reading a book about someone else’s grief, and while I’m in the process of grieving, I couldn’t even relate to any of it.
Don’t get me wrong. There were parts of the book I liked, and some of the characters were interesting, especially Juna. I just wish it hadn’t taken so long for us to meet them. For such a short book, it was kind of hard to get through.
Maybe if your grief is normal grief, this book will work for you. But it’s not what I want from something that I found on a queer horror book list. Give me a twisted form of grief! Give me something!
This story is about grief. Which is fine, and lovely and horrifying etc etc, but it didn’t have anything interesting to SAY about grief. And this is coming from me, someone who recently lost their mom and cut off all contact with their dad. If you want to write over a hundred pages of sadness about how losing your wife is like losing your parent, can those pages offer me something new? Or perhaps my own grief is just so different than the author’s grief that it is impossible to relate. I guess that felt alienating to me, to feel like I was reading a book about someone else’s grief, and while I’m in the process of grieving, I couldn’t even relate to any of it.
Don’t get me wrong. There were parts of the book I liked, and some of the characters were interesting, especially Juna. I just wish it hadn’t taken so long for us to meet them. For such a short book, it was kind of hard to get through.
Maybe if your grief is normal grief, this book will work for you. But it’s not what I want from something that I found on a queer horror book list. Give me a twisted form of grief! Give me something!