The Last True Poets of the Sea is evidently a retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which means nothing to me, because I’ve never read Twelfth Night. Luckily, it was still enjoyable! Drake modernizes the tale so thoroughly that previous knowledge is not required. That alone is impressive; even better is that she somehow does this while also maintaining an appreciation for the stage. Performance of all kinds - theatrical, the ways we pretend to be who we’re not in our everyday lives - lies, along with shipwrecks, at the thematic heart of the book. It fits perfectly with the story’s origins.

Some more good: The writing is lovely. It deals frankly with mental illness. The climax - no spoilers - is breathtaking. The love interest is the first character named Liv I’ve ever read - finally, the representation I’ve been waiting for. I love a good book about healing, one where everything isn’t “fixed” but that suggests a path forward, the beginning of a difficult but achievable process. Everyone in this book is at least a little bit hurt, and their stumbling toward the light is rendered both compassionately and, for the most part, realistically. I do think it’s a bit too long, that it occasionally over-explains - for example, it takes a long time to wrap up after the climactic scene, and even doubles back to unpack it. I wish Drake would’ve had the confidence to let the climax - weird, dreamlike, powerful - stand on its own. I also don’t quite buy that no one in Lyric would have tried to find the shipwreck before Liv and Violet came around. Drake is clearly trying to work in a theme there: Liv says that the town is obsessed with a romantic misrepresentation of its founders, so much so that they refuse to actually research them in fear of finding uncomfortable truths. Okay, fair enough, that’s why no one has bothered to delve too deeply into Violet’s ancestors’ marriage. But what does the ship itself have to do with that? I don’t believe that people wouldn’t seek it out because seeing it would remind them of tragedy. We as a species both romanticized and yearned to see the Titanic up close. People used to get married there, on submarines. The physical fact of a shipwreck doesn’t stop us from ignoring the tragedy behind it - we often rob historical suffering of its horror by gawking uncritically at the empty shells it leaves behind (see: plantation tours). I get the theme, but it doesn’t really line up with how people actually act, which I think weakens it.

Anyway. This book was quite good! A little overlong, a little shaky, but overall a nice, moving read, clearly lovingly crafted. Obviously I have some quibbles, and sometimes quibbles can turn into tangents, and also at two points in this book a character calls Liv “Livi” only it’s spelled “Livvy,” what’s up with that?