Danya
julia armfield never misses for me, but I found what was happening in the background (a drowned world, the mold-like growth of cults, the alternating need for despair and disconnect in times of crisis) a richer text than our three protagonists. it was like getting glimpses of a more interesting story happening over their shoulders before the narrative inevitably steered me back to their infighting. the ending felt a bit rushed, disjointed, and ultimately unsatisfying, but much of my critique comes from the fact that our wives under the sea is such a knockout.
this novel tries so hard to be "six of crows" but ends up reading like a grasping appeal to a booktok audience. uncomfortably stuffed with too many tropes (an ocean's eleven style heist, vampires, a weapon with an excalibur-esque legacy - plus elves? dropped as an aside in the last 20 pages) without consideration toward building a world that might contain them all. underdeveloped; could've used some more time to steep.
at its best, this novel reads like a rich impression of sámi life, evoking everyday culture and custom with precise details and fraught, intersectional cultural tension.
but on a narrative level, the plot is threadbare, which meant the characters were circling around the problem established on page one for the entire book. even the climax, which had far and away the best pacing, didn't seem to bear any real emotional weight. the dry, pragmatic prose style—which, to be fair, might be more a problem of the translation than the original text—felt at odds with what should've been an evocative bit of storytelling. noir-lite, nordic crime-ish, a wishy-washy jo nesbø.
filled with the trope-isms of an author writing explicitly for booktok. underdeveloped and overexplained, with two protagonists who are elevated as "special" for lackluster reasons. wildly scattershot character development, confounding narrative logic, and despite being built on what should be an interesting setting and foundational mythology, was mostly just boring to read.
dense, grounded, expansive - some chapters can run on a little long or read a bit dry, but worth reading for the descriptions of sea ice and arctic tundra alone. I can't stop thinking about this book, how quietly it articulates questions of place and perception, and how it doesn't attempt to untangle the thorniness of those questions. some of the best nature writing and ecocriticism I've read.
I'm annoyed by how much I liked this book. the language is deceptively simple but the sentences build to create this turbulent, tumultuous, thunderous effect, almost like being inside a washing machine. the characters are caught in a prism, and each facade illuminates as much as it fractures. I thought my phase of reading literary novels was over, but this book reminded me that, in fact, they can be good.
I have read and loved all of leigh bardugo's other novels, but ultimately, I enjoyed the concept of this book much more than its execution. maybe bardugo thought that, with enough orange blossom water, she could magic this book into something more compelling, but as is, it was just ok.
such a sharp writer on the line, but for me, the book never built to the promise of its prose. after 100 pages, the chapters began to blur together, and even a non-chronological structure didn't help to pull an overarching narrative out of her experience. some precise, poetic impressions, but failed to coalesce into anything more.
the first third is killer - wintery and atmospheric, with lush prose to match the folkloric tone, full of so many descriptions of ice and good red wool I wanted to curl up by a wood stove. just enough allusions to rumplestiltskin to feel familiar but with enough distance to be surprising. fun! the middle felt a little slow but didn't drag for me. the ending tied everything up very neatly in a way that felt tonally appropriate to fairy tales but maybe didn't have the depth or humanity of the earlier chapters. that said, this book went down real easy. I'd recommend it!