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A review by siavahda
Deep Blue by Jennifer Donnelly
1.0
The cruellest kind of story is the one that starts so beautifully. Where the beginning pages fly by so quickly they blur, and your heart begins to pound because maybe this is it, maybe this is one of those books; the ones that make your best-of-the-year list and you remember forever.
And then fails you. Utterly, devastatingly, and completely.
The story opens with Princess Serafina, a young mermaid about to undergo the ceremony that will recognise her as her realm’s next ruler and simultaneously cement her betrothal to the Crown Prince of another undersea kingdom. And for the first 15% of the book, I was head over heels in love, because Donnelly’s world-building is unabashedly incredible. The merfolk are descended from the people of Atlantis, which neatly explains several of the (few) world-building flaws; if it’s strange that merpeople frown upon swimming out of windows, and polite company only uses doors (rather than having several entrances and exits that serve as both door AND window, which would have been my logical assumption for an underwater society) it’s probably a left-over relic from a time when their culture was a human one and on land. After Atlantis was destroyed, a goddess transformed the Atlanteans into merpeople, who then separated to form several different kingdoms, each with their own form of government and distinct culture – Serafina’s is a realm ruled by reginas, or all-powerful queens, who take consorts but have no kings to rule alongside them, while her best friend Neera comes from a kind of undersea India that even has sea-elephants and turbans. There’s mention of one ‘kingdom’ with a president and another with a high elder or possibly council of elders ruling over them, so it’s clear that Donnelly has given a tonne of thought to how her merpeople would have spread and developed into separate cultures. I MUCH prefer this to what we usually see, which is authors lumping an entire species into just one culture – we rarely see separate societies of elves, for example, just one single elven culture.
By far my favourite aspect of the novel, and what originally had me estimating it as a five star book, is the language. Not the writing style, but the many idioms and metaphors that are part of mer speech. They are fantastic, and I fell in love with them very, very quickly.
[as idle as a sponge.]
[“You’re as white as a shark’s belly. Are you ill?”]
[“It was all froth and seafoam.”]
[He swam with a fast crowd.]
[It was totally riptide!]
Donnelly does not fall into the usual secondary-world trap of comparing things to objects that do not exist in her world. Whatever else she did, she gets mega points for this because it is something that almost every fantasy author falls down on, and I cannot tell you how delighted I was to see that that was not the case here.
For example, when speaking of the aura of suppressed excitement and restlessness around her, Serafina describes it thus -
[the hot-spring atmosphere of her court]
Or, instead of ‘pony-tail’ -
[he wears his hair pulled back in a hippokamp’s tail!”]
Isn’t that fantastic? More, Donnelly has thought up several sports and pastimes for her mer; teenagers go ‘shoaling’, which I at first thought was undersea slang for partying, but actually means joining the hive-mind of a shoal of fish for a wild kind of high, and there’s a kind of under-water polo played with hippocami (given a more Greek spelling in the book, as you can see above – which fits with the Greek influence on Serafina’s kingdom. But as a mythology nut I flailed with happiness to find such a rarely-mentioned magical creature included, however you spell the name!) Cruel words cut ‘like shark’s teeth’; red, pouty lips are ‘tentacle-stung’, and when describing a person’s bloodline, you might refer to ‘the family coral’ instead of family tree. Donnelly also enjoys her puns; money is ‘currensea’, and the sweet filling in candy is ‘caramalgae’. I guess that might annoy some people, but I am a gleeful collector of terrible puns and didn’t mind one bit.
All of this was worked in very quickly, without info-dumping, in the first 15% or so of the novel. And then it all goes wrong.
I can even tell you the specific moment when it all begins to unravel: when Serafina discovers that the young man she is betrothed to – and whom she loves, and who, before now, claimed to love her back – has a ‘merlfriend’, and has completely changed from his quiet, private self and become a party-boy.
(Of course, it’s clearly not so. It’s that kind of ‘discovery’; the kind we’re all familiar with, in that it will, in the end, turn out to be one big misunderstanding and nothing more).
It goes like this;
[Her heart was broken. She’d given it to Mahdi, and he’d shattered it. He was not who she thought he was. He was careless and cruel and she never wanted to see him again.]
This passage sent a quiver of unease through me; not because it’s so ridiculously over-dramatic (although it is), but because it’s so blunt. If this is heart-break, it’s a rushed, rough thing, without any real emotional impact. Where’s the pain? The anguish? Why are we being told this, instead of shown how Serafina feels?
This, unfortunately, is a problem that does not go away. I continued reading because I hoped that this was merely a stumbling point; maybe Donnelly was unfamiliar with heart-break or not gifted at writing strong emotion (although that never bodes well, really). I hoped that it would be a rough patch that I would pass to return to what I had already decided was going to be one of my favourite books of the year.
But it doesn’t go away. If anything, from this point on Deep Water goes faster and faster, becoming more and more rushed, without ever pausing to really expand on anything – including the oh-so-vital cast of the prophecy (I’ll get to that in a minute). It felt as though Donnelly spent a great deal of time polishing the first few chapters of her book, in order to draw in the reader (and the literary agent/publisher, one assumes?) and then gave up; it abruptly drops from the level of a YA novel to a (badly written) Middle Grade one. The beautifully complex world Donnelly has created is never again given a chance to develop; fantastic concepts and ideas are never fleshed out, characters that should be jaw-droppingly amazing (a blind mermaid from the Amazon, with a seeing-eye piranha? HOW COULD YOU SCREW THAT UP?) are two-dimensional at best (which, in the case of the Brazilian mergirl, was so disappointing I may have shed a few real-life tears for the death of such incredible potential), and the numerous revelations about the past of the merpeople and the history of Atlantis come so thick and fast that they just become dull.
As for the prophecy… Yes, there’s a prophecy. No, that is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Plenty of stories pull off prophecies incredibly well. But I was a little wary when the blurb mentioned that there would be six prophesied ones. Six is a large number of main characters to fully develop. You can have much larger casts than that, but usually only one or two are the ‘main’ characters, and by definition I would think that any Chosen Ones ought to be considered ‘main’. I assumed that Donnelly would introduce three of the chosen six, maximum, in book one – giving us time to get to know each one and make a place for them in our hearts - and that book two would be spent searching for the next three, with book three as the final showdown. (I don’t know that this series is intended to be a trilogy, but that’s the traditional set up for a prophecy plotline in YA, more or less).
Well, that’s not how it went down. All six Chosen Ones are crammed into this 370 page book, and frankly, it’s not enough space for them. Donnelly does not pull them off; as I said earlier, few of them have any chance to develop past cardboard cutouts. There’s little sense of personality beyond the first two or three, and as much as I wanted to, I could not have cared less about girls 3-6 – even the blind Brazilian with her seeing-eye piranha. Which was such a great idea! That is an amazing character design! But like so much else in Deep Water, it was never fully realised.
Also concerning the prophecy: the magic powers. Again, there’s almost no development: Chosen Ones #1 and #2 have hints and clues about their gifts dropped along the way, but as for the rest, their abilities show up out of nowhere pretty much instantly (hardly surprising, since they get their powers the same day we meet the characters) and ‘within hours’ they have rapidly grown in strength. To this I say a great big: NO. That is NOT acceptable. It is too fast. I hate having things like this just dropped into my lap; I almost never see plot devices coming, but I appreciate being able to look back and spot all the clues I missed, and I get extremely grumpy if there are no clues to look back on. As there are not, here.
All of this was horribly disappointing, but what drove me mad was that, despite the excellent world-building (which, on its own, deserves at least five stars), Donnelly has left a tonne of gaping holes of logic and reasoning in her world/story. For example: she constantly refers to blood as ‘dripping’, or in some other way doing something blood cannot do underwater. Underwater, blood diffuses; it certainly doesn’t drip. Why do mermaids never get hair in their faces, even though it’s so long and they don’t wear special hairstyles to prevent it? Why do they wear dresses, which must surely billow up constantly? How can people lie down on the floor, or on beds (a problem Tanith Lee solves in her undersea kingdom in Death’s Master, so don’t tell me it can’t be done); how can someone ‘crumple to the ground’, or kneel, when underwater bodies naturally float upwards? I approve of a mermaid culture based on India, but wearing turbans underwater must make moving around extremely difficult since it’s not exactly aerodynamic (hydrodynamic?) It is eventually explained how merpeople can speak underwater; apparently their goddess ‘strengthened their voices’, but there are dozens of other problems that drove me absolutely nuts. And that’s without passages like this
[sang a fragor lux spell. This time, the light bomb she whirled across the room took a chunk out of the wall.
“Whoa,” she whispered…]
Nobody else in the room flinches, or ducks? No one else reacts at all to this thing that can take out a wall?
Or
[They’d made it. With the help of the others. They were finally here. Soon they would learn why they had been summoned.]
By the end, I was so frustrated I would happily have thrown the book across the room, had I been reading a paperback instead of an ebook. Not even for something this bad will I threaten my precious Kindle.
The world-building is excellent. Better by far than most mermaid stories. But the story is rushed and the vast majority of the characters two-dimensional, with the result that the book does not live up to the high expectations created by the wonderful beginning. Deep Water is that horrible thing: a book with a fantastic world, but a terrible story.
You can get away with little world-building, if you have a great story. But excellent world-building will not make up for a bad story, and although Deep Water had all the elements for a really incredible book, it is, in the end, a very bad one. Not recommended for anyone.
And then fails you. Utterly, devastatingly, and completely.
The story opens with Princess Serafina, a young mermaid about to undergo the ceremony that will recognise her as her realm’s next ruler and simultaneously cement her betrothal to the Crown Prince of another undersea kingdom. And for the first 15% of the book, I was head over heels in love, because Donnelly’s world-building is unabashedly incredible. The merfolk are descended from the people of Atlantis, which neatly explains several of the (few) world-building flaws; if it’s strange that merpeople frown upon swimming out of windows, and polite company only uses doors (rather than having several entrances and exits that serve as both door AND window, which would have been my logical assumption for an underwater society) it’s probably a left-over relic from a time when their culture was a human one and on land. After Atlantis was destroyed, a goddess transformed the Atlanteans into merpeople, who then separated to form several different kingdoms, each with their own form of government and distinct culture – Serafina’s is a realm ruled by reginas, or all-powerful queens, who take consorts but have no kings to rule alongside them, while her best friend Neera comes from a kind of undersea India that even has sea-elephants and turbans. There’s mention of one ‘kingdom’ with a president and another with a high elder or possibly council of elders ruling over them, so it’s clear that Donnelly has given a tonne of thought to how her merpeople would have spread and developed into separate cultures. I MUCH prefer this to what we usually see, which is authors lumping an entire species into just one culture – we rarely see separate societies of elves, for example, just one single elven culture.
By far my favourite aspect of the novel, and what originally had me estimating it as a five star book, is the language. Not the writing style, but the many idioms and metaphors that are part of mer speech. They are fantastic, and I fell in love with them very, very quickly.
[as idle as a sponge.]
[“You’re as white as a shark’s belly. Are you ill?”]
[“It was all froth and seafoam.”]
[He swam with a fast crowd.]
[It was totally riptide!]
Donnelly does not fall into the usual secondary-world trap of comparing things to objects that do not exist in her world. Whatever else she did, she gets mega points for this because it is something that almost every fantasy author falls down on, and I cannot tell you how delighted I was to see that that was not the case here.
For example, when speaking of the aura of suppressed excitement and restlessness around her, Serafina describes it thus -
[the hot-spring atmosphere of her court]
Or, instead of ‘pony-tail’ -
[he wears his hair pulled back in a hippokamp’s tail!”]
Isn’t that fantastic? More, Donnelly has thought up several sports and pastimes for her mer; teenagers go ‘shoaling’, which I at first thought was undersea slang for partying, but actually means joining the hive-mind of a shoal of fish for a wild kind of high, and there’s a kind of under-water polo played with hippocami (given a more Greek spelling in the book, as you can see above – which fits with the Greek influence on Serafina’s kingdom. But as a mythology nut I flailed with happiness to find such a rarely-mentioned magical creature included, however you spell the name!) Cruel words cut ‘like shark’s teeth’; red, pouty lips are ‘tentacle-stung’, and when describing a person’s bloodline, you might refer to ‘the family coral’ instead of family tree. Donnelly also enjoys her puns; money is ‘currensea’, and the sweet filling in candy is ‘caramalgae’. I guess that might annoy some people, but I am a gleeful collector of terrible puns and didn’t mind one bit.
All of this was worked in very quickly, without info-dumping, in the first 15% or so of the novel. And then it all goes wrong.
I can even tell you the specific moment when it all begins to unravel: when Serafina discovers that the young man she is betrothed to – and whom she loves, and who, before now, claimed to love her back – has a ‘merlfriend’, and has completely changed from his quiet, private self and become a party-boy.
(Of course, it’s clearly not so. It’s that kind of ‘discovery’; the kind we’re all familiar with, in that it will, in the end, turn out to be one big misunderstanding and nothing more).
It goes like this;
[Her heart was broken. She’d given it to Mahdi, and he’d shattered it. He was not who she thought he was. He was careless and cruel and she never wanted to see him again.]
This passage sent a quiver of unease through me; not because it’s so ridiculously over-dramatic (although it is), but because it’s so blunt. If this is heart-break, it’s a rushed, rough thing, without any real emotional impact. Where’s the pain? The anguish? Why are we being told this, instead of shown how Serafina feels?
This, unfortunately, is a problem that does not go away. I continued reading because I hoped that this was merely a stumbling point; maybe Donnelly was unfamiliar with heart-break or not gifted at writing strong emotion (although that never bodes well, really). I hoped that it would be a rough patch that I would pass to return to what I had already decided was going to be one of my favourite books of the year.
But it doesn’t go away. If anything, from this point on Deep Water goes faster and faster, becoming more and more rushed, without ever pausing to really expand on anything – including the oh-so-vital cast of the prophecy (I’ll get to that in a minute). It felt as though Donnelly spent a great deal of time polishing the first few chapters of her book, in order to draw in the reader (and the literary agent/publisher, one assumes?) and then gave up; it abruptly drops from the level of a YA novel to a (badly written) Middle Grade one. The beautifully complex world Donnelly has created is never again given a chance to develop; fantastic concepts and ideas are never fleshed out, characters that should be jaw-droppingly amazing (a blind mermaid from the Amazon, with a seeing-eye piranha? HOW COULD YOU SCREW THAT UP?) are two-dimensional at best (which, in the case of the Brazilian mergirl, was so disappointing I may have shed a few real-life tears for the death of such incredible potential), and the numerous revelations about the past of the merpeople and the history of Atlantis come so thick and fast that they just become dull.
As for the prophecy… Yes, there’s a prophecy. No, that is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Plenty of stories pull off prophecies incredibly well. But I was a little wary when the blurb mentioned that there would be six prophesied ones. Six is a large number of main characters to fully develop. You can have much larger casts than that, but usually only one or two are the ‘main’ characters, and by definition I would think that any Chosen Ones ought to be considered ‘main’. I assumed that Donnelly would introduce three of the chosen six, maximum, in book one – giving us time to get to know each one and make a place for them in our hearts - and that book two would be spent searching for the next three, with book three as the final showdown. (I don’t know that this series is intended to be a trilogy, but that’s the traditional set up for a prophecy plotline in YA, more or less).
Well, that’s not how it went down. All six Chosen Ones are crammed into this 370 page book, and frankly, it’s not enough space for them. Donnelly does not pull them off; as I said earlier, few of them have any chance to develop past cardboard cutouts. There’s little sense of personality beyond the first two or three, and as much as I wanted to, I could not have cared less about girls 3-6 – even the blind Brazilian with her seeing-eye piranha. Which was such a great idea! That is an amazing character design! But like so much else in Deep Water, it was never fully realised.
Also concerning the prophecy: the magic powers. Again, there’s almost no development: Chosen Ones #1 and #2 have hints and clues about their gifts dropped along the way, but as for the rest, their abilities show up out of nowhere pretty much instantly (hardly surprising, since they get their powers the same day we meet the characters) and ‘within hours’ they have rapidly grown in strength. To this I say a great big: NO. That is NOT acceptable. It is too fast. I hate having things like this just dropped into my lap; I almost never see plot devices coming, but I appreciate being able to look back and spot all the clues I missed, and I get extremely grumpy if there are no clues to look back on. As there are not, here.
All of this was horribly disappointing, but what drove me mad was that, despite the excellent world-building (which, on its own, deserves at least five stars), Donnelly has left a tonne of gaping holes of logic and reasoning in her world/story. For example: she constantly refers to blood as ‘dripping’, or in some other way doing something blood cannot do underwater. Underwater, blood diffuses; it certainly doesn’t drip. Why do mermaids never get hair in their faces, even though it’s so long and they don’t wear special hairstyles to prevent it? Why do they wear dresses, which must surely billow up constantly? How can people lie down on the floor, or on beds (a problem Tanith Lee solves in her undersea kingdom in Death’s Master, so don’t tell me it can’t be done); how can someone ‘crumple to the ground’, or kneel, when underwater bodies naturally float upwards? I approve of a mermaid culture based on India, but wearing turbans underwater must make moving around extremely difficult since it’s not exactly aerodynamic (hydrodynamic?) It is eventually explained how merpeople can speak underwater; apparently their goddess ‘strengthened their voices’, but there are dozens of other problems that drove me absolutely nuts. And that’s without passages like this
[
“Whoa,” she whispered…]
Nobody else in the room flinches, or ducks? No one else reacts at all to this thing that can take out a wall?
Or
[They’d made it. With the help of the others. They were finally here. Soon they would learn why they had been summoned.]
By the end, I was so frustrated I would happily have thrown the book across the room, had I been reading a paperback instead of an ebook. Not even for something this bad will I threaten my precious Kindle.
The world-building is excellent. Better by far than most mermaid stories. But the story is rushed and the vast majority of the characters two-dimensional, with the result that the book does not live up to the high expectations created by the wonderful beginning. Deep Water is that horrible thing: a book with a fantastic world, but a terrible story.
You can get away with little world-building, if you have a great story. But excellent world-building will not make up for a bad story, and although Deep Water had all the elements for a really incredible book, it is, in the end, a very bad one. Not recommended for anyone.