Darren Groth

I received this eARC from Orca Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Obligatory Summary

This is a difficult book to summarize because, honestly, I don't really know what happened.

Basically, take that one movie about a girl who loves surfing but gets bitten by a shark and losses an arm but learns to surf again, and merge it with a fever dream version of Aqua Marine, and you'll still not have what happened. This book makes no sense. I'll give you what I did understand, though.

So, Ash saves Clayton from dying in the prologue and in the first chapter they're suddenly casually declaring their love. Ash is a hardcore swimmer who breaks a world record and gets swept up in her mother's dream of stardom. Then she suffers a devastating accident that changes her life forever. Clayton...draws, I guess? He has a sassy chain-smoking Finnish grandma and that's about all I can really say.

The Writing (and Worldbuilding?)

So, is this an urban fantasy or a magical realism fever dream? I honestly don't know.

The book felt like two distinct coherent stories chopped up and smashed together: 1) Ash, the swimmer, and her power hungry, emotionally deprived mother, facing the aftermath of a terrible accident; 2) Clayton and his grandma chill and she regales him with stories about his grandfather who was a soldier in Korea. And then suddenly, there's mystical drawings (because you can ~accidentally~ draw things) and water-lover mermaids and Cuba. All in less than 200 pages. It was a mess, honestly. The grandma was the only interesting character, and her love story told entirely in anecdotes was more real, passionate, and believable than the forced mess between two wooden planks I was supposed to be invested in for no discernable reason.

The Characters

Ash: Between the two of them, she definitely had more personality, but honestly, she was so unrelatable. She was always talking about her ~training~ and her mystical ~connection~ to the water, and as someone who has literally never swam in my life (I'm a wimp and not standing on solid surfaces freaks me out, okay?) I couldn't relate whatsoever.

Clayton: You'd think I related to him because he draws and so do I but, but he was so boring. He spends the whole book in Ash's shadow being vaguely confused. And honestly, same. (I guess we do relate lol)

Blythe: Excuse me while I look for character arcs for any of these characters. Oh wait, there aren't any. Blythe is just as mean and stubborn and unreasonably villainous as she is at the beginning by the end.

Coach Dwyer: How do you pronounce that? D-why-er? D-w-ear? Who knows?

Tuula: Heck yeah, give more sassy chain-smoking Finnish grandma!

Conclusion

I kinda hated this book. It sucks. Don't read it when it comes out. Except maybe if you want Tuula in your life, which is a good reason. Read it for her. She's totally worth it.… (mehr)

This book... Okay. I really love magical realism. It's my jam. And this book had that- which is good. And it had great cover art. And there was an awesome chain smoking grandma. But otherwise the book wasn't for me. It wasn't bad. Honestly, it was really well written and I like the author's style. I just didn't connect with any of the characters strongly. This is possibly because I'm not the target audience, so don't take this review as a suggestion to skip this book. It's totally a case of -It's not you, it's me.-… (mehr)