This was amazing. I didn't feel very well (long working summer exhaustion), and started randomly reading this after being taken with the title and off kilter cover art.
I couldn't stop reading and finished a day later. It's about the deep sea, what might be there. The love between two people, two women, the little everyday things. The parents you don't understand and can't get through to but love anyway. The failure of communication in its many ways.
The haunting of grief. How people can not be dead, but already gone. (Like when my now dead ex husband had a stroke and was forever after like a cousin of himself, definitely related but utterly not the same person as before.) Relearning a new person, and what they might need, against what you need.
I still think that one of the roots of horror as a genre are in the horror of the (relatively) well when faced with regular caring for or being in close proximity to a chronically ill person, a person slowly changing beyond recognition to you or themselves or both. Fear of contagion, mentally and physically. Fear of permeability, of fragmentation, dissolving.
The story and it's characters were lyrical and brisk, clear and straight. The voices of Leah and Miri were so strong, so likeable. Pieces of a world already gone when the book begins. Story of a love story over except for one last act.
I felt the echoes of so many films in this, as I'm sure was intended. "It's going to be alright now/it'll be alright now" echoed straight from Paranormal Activity, near the end, when Katie's voice doubles. Many loving references to Jaws. Many others.
I haven't been this engaged with a book in months. If you like your horror/ghost stories a bit literary, a bit sad, strange, about women loving each other, and incidentally learning a lot more about something you didn't know loads about before (here the sea), you will not be disappointed. Very much recommended.
***
(This review is also up on my Goodreads, but with less words!)
