Beneath the Starlit Sea has a lot of promise as a story. The premise is really interesting, and think that it could be incredible with a little work. The story follows a witch and a doctor who are tasked to discover what’s been killing men at night. The threat is potentially magical, but it’s been hard to find any discerning evidence.

That being said, this reads almost like a draft zero to me. Sure, there’s been line editing, but I think there’s a ways to go with developmental edits.

The first thing that struck me was the length of the sentences. Each sentence is a plodding run-on with little to no variation. I feel like breaking up the sentences would bring the book up to a three star book almost immediately. As it is currently, reading it feels like a slog. The sentence structure also, unfortunately, detracts from the really interesting descriptions because it’s all shoved into one line. This makes the pacing both incredibly fast, while feeling slow.

The story spends little to no time building emotional weight, and so scenes don’t stand out. Nor do the characters, unfortunately. And when the romance begins, I almost got whiplash. The love interest, Garit, seems like a stand-in for Geralt (The Witcher) for the first few chapters, until he’s suddenly waxing poetic about how his love is the kind that bards write about. It feels very out of character, and I have no other context clues to make sense of this shift in his nature. Similarly, Illyse, our main character, doesn’t seem to have more than an attraction to him at first. Then out of the blue she’s in love. We’re to believe these two have been working together for two months, and then this just occurs. Their relationship should have been more advanced than it was, in my opinion.

Ultimately, the reason I feel like this reads like a “draft zero” is because it reads as if the author is plotting out the story. I,e, “This happens, then this happens, then this happens.” While there are some good nuggets of prose, certain scenes definitely need to be expanded upon. I know people roll their eyes at the “show, don’t tell” advice, but this is a perfect instance of how a story could be improved upon by following it. We’re often told what is happening, but there’s no sense of what it looks, feels, smells, sounds, or tastes like.

Ultimately, I gave this two stars because I feel like it has so much potential to be something amazing. Howevre, it just didn’t hit the mark for me, personally. I genuinely don’t think it’s bad, just feel that it’s not for me and the style I’ve come to enjoy.