Child of a Hidden Sea

Dellamonica is one of those mid-list authors that I am bound and determined to get people to read. She's a queer author, who writes fascinating stories featuring great world-building and an assortment of queer people and people of color. While Child of a Hidden Sea is not quite as mind-bending as her previously duology (Indigo Springs and Blue Magic), the plot is a serviceable “modern person thrust into a fantasy world”. The fantasy world is an archipelago-based Mediterranean ocean-going set, with pirates, religious fanatics, hedonists, matriarchal societies, and a naval-based United Nations. The main character? Sophie Hansa, an adopted child looking for her parents who, upon intervening in an attack on her (possible) biological aunt ends up crash-landing on one of the smaller islands. Where, for me, the story really shines is the interactions between Sophie, and her siblings– Bramwell, her adopted brother, and Verena, her just-met biological sister. The feelings of discovery and stress rang really true. Dellamonica also put a lot of energy into developing an intricate and believable ecology and mysterious origin for her fantasy world, allowing a focus to drift from the political drama at times because Sophie is an oceanographer/videographer, which, for me, rounded out not only Sophie's character by the world in a way that's almost never explored.