Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by baechael
Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I’m not sure how a book that’s about grief, loss, body horror, and the deep ocean (which is literally one of my biggest fears) somehow manages to make me feel a whole lot of nothing, but here we are.
On a sentence level, the storytelling is nice. I liked the water metaphors that are strewn throughout. It makes sense with what the story is. I just wish that it had been more clear. To use a water based metaphor, reading this book is like trying to peer through ice. Everything is foggy and distorted and you find yourself a bit confused about what exactly you’re looking at. I don’t think that this story was enough of anything. It didn’t make me feel a particular way towards the characters, I wasn’t especially intrigued by whatever may be in the deep (was it a giant fish? A mer-something? A squid thing? An eldritch god? Literally describe it more than just a god damn eye please for the love of god), the center could have been interesting but Miri lacked the agency to literally do anything other than read Reddit, and the transformation was also weird and vague.
This could have been very interesting, but instead I got only one wife under the sea doing nothing and another wife on land doing shockingly even less.
On a sentence level, the storytelling is nice. I liked the water metaphors that are strewn throughout. It makes sense with what the story is. I just wish that it had been more clear. To use a water based metaphor, reading this book is like trying to peer through ice. Everything is foggy and distorted and you find yourself a bit confused about what exactly you’re looking at. I don’t think that this story was enough of anything. It didn’t make me feel a particular way towards the characters, I wasn’t especially intrigued by whatever may be in the deep (was it a giant fish? A mer-something? A squid thing? An eldritch god? Literally describe it more than just a god damn eye please for the love of god), the center could have been interesting but Miri lacked the agency to literally do anything other than read Reddit, and the transformation was also weird and vague.
This could have been very interesting, but instead I got only one wife under the sea doing nothing and another wife on land doing shockingly even less.