I find this a complicated book to review. On the one hand I love the eeriness of the setting. The sea being something to fear, water eroding at every living being, the sea taking everyone’s life in the end, but the rotting and decay being the true enemy. The talk of drowning, both as a person and of the land. The mentioned of a huge drowning taking entire towns and thousands of people with it hundreds of years ago, leaving scars on both the peoples and the land. The atmosphere was always tense in that way, and the poems and tidbits from both the book Angharad added onto that lore. The magic of the foreboding fairy king, the saints and the sleepers made Llirya to be a place of forgotten magic and superstition, but for the believers it was always something ever present, just beyond the corner of your eye, a natural part of life.

Sadly beyond the lore we have a story about a girl who’s been mistreated and misused by men, made to feel like it’s all her fault by a mysoginistic academic setting, where she’s seen as a woman when she’s to blame but a girl when she’s to be taken advantage of. And a story about an a boy who wants to find the truth. I still don’t get why he was so focused on this specific truth though. 

There was a bit of a mismatch between my expectations for the story and the so called relationship between the lovers. Effy seemed like a very frightened and careful girl in the first parts of the book with no wish for any companionship, until she happens to meet Preston. It just seemed like a shoe horned in love story, which affected much of the pacing since the ‘urgency’ was lost quite a few times due to them being forced into proximity. Personally I just never saw a spark between them and lamented the fact that we were spending time on the romance at all since that could’ve been more time we could have spent in lore.

I’m still saddened by the fact that we were promised some sort of transformation in relation to the waters, but I suppose rather then it happening physically we got a personality change. I just wanted to see some gills and fins.

All in all, the book had an amazingly creepy atmosphere, but mediocre characters and story development and much less magic then I expected and wanted. I filled in a lot of blank gaps myself, which was also an entertaining time, though I’m not sure if it’s what should have been needed for this book.