this was just so insanely fun

this was...fine

I didn't love that it was told almost exclusively in letters and I really felt that the relationship between Dawsey and Juliet was woefully underdeveloped. The history was interesting and overall I did really like the cast of characters on Guernsey, so. Mixed bag, I guess?

Did Desi do some truly batshit insane dangerous nonsense in her quest for love? yes. if she was a friend of mine, i would NEVER have enabled her the way her friends did.

but this book made it shockingly easy to overlook all that nonsense and just enjoy Desi's relationship with her dad and how flawed but engaging all of the characters were.

Into the Drowning Deep is, in a weird way, why I don't read a ton of adult SF/F books. I really enjoyed this book. 4 stars is high. And yet, at the same time, I genuinely feel that if this had been YA, I would have given it 5 stars. One of the main hallmarks of adult SF/F is the expectation of a longer attention span from readers, meaning that authors tend to get more into the nitty-gritty of their worldbuilding or, in this case, their science. While this certainly isn't bad, I think I just generally don't have that attention span, which leads to it taking four weeks (in the case of this book) for me to finish a book -- a quality I find frustrating and which prohibits me from attaching myself to the book of characters in the way I can when I finish a book in a few days or less.

Anyway all this rambling to say: excellent book, mermaids were frightening and perfect, and Seanan Maguire is a god among mortals.