A review by books_ergo_sum
A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

adventurous emotional mysterious tense

5.0

I loved this book! It was everything I want:

✨ dark academia

✨ faeries

✨ atmospheric setting + lyrical writing

✨ perfectly imperfect MCs

✨ feeling unsettled 

✨ a cute rivals to lovers forced proximity romance 

✨ meta references—if my dark academia romance book doesn’t have excerpts from made up literature textbooks debating ‘what is a romance book?’ then I don’t want it

The vibe of this book feels hard to explain. I think it was:

-a more successfully unsettling and lyrical story than The Last Tale of the Flower Bride (which I hated)

-a more atmospheric mixture of academia and faerie lore than Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries (which I DNFed but probably should try again)

-plus The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?? That’s honestly the je ne sais quoi magic of this book, I think.

It was published by Harper Teen but it was definitely on the mature side of YA Fantasy, in terms of themes and tone. So keep this in mind if you want to pick it up—cozy YA Fantasy, this was not.

I also highly recommend the audiobook.