Rating
Details
AUTHOR: Sylvie Cathrall
SERIES: The Sunken Archive #1
GENRE: fantasy
AGE: adult
BLURB:
A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other.
Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.’s home, and she and Henerey vanish.
A year later, E.’s sister Sophy, and Henerey’s brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery of their siblings’ disappearances with the letters, sketches and field notes left behind. As they uncover the wondrous love their siblings shared, Sophy and Vyerin learn the key to their disappearance – and what it could mean for life as they know it.
Review
Thank you to Orbit for an ARC of this book.
First off, this book was compared to Emily Wilde and the only similarities it really holds is the academia tone and the fact that it’s written in an epistolary form. The content of the book itself was quite different.
The biggest thing is that this book takes place under the water. While I love the sea, the thought of being under the water throughout this whole book had me kind of feeling a certain way. Namely being a little freaked out like the main character, E.
Anyways, I overall did not find the book super engaging. There was a lot of back and forth between multiple characters, not just between the main characters but also between other characters as well. I feel like this was well done. However, I also got very bored reading the book because it felt like nothing was happening. And then finally at like the 70% mark stuff finally began happening, but at that point I was no longer interested so it was hard for me to stay focused to the end.
Also, it is not a standalone, it is a series so the book did not even come to a conclusion and I did not feel that I got what I wanted out of the book because so much was left unresolved.
It wasn’t even like it was a cliffhanger it just I just was not enticed to read further.
The writing style was heavily academic so it was also a bit harder to read in the sense that it didn’t flow as well.
Overall, it was an interesting concept, But just did not end up working for me the way I wanted it to.
This book is definitely going to appeal to some readers. It just ended up not being the perfect book for me.
