Reviews with content warning for Classism - A Study in Drowning

Reviews tagging 'Classism'

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

45 reviews

desiderium_incarnate's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

I think this story will stay with me for a bit.

For most of the book I was unsure how reliable Effy was as a narrator but I think think that might reflect more on me than it does on the book. It really is beautifully written, I just have one issue: Everyone mentions how smart and brave Effy is and of course, yes, she is, but whyyyy did you not go talk to the secretive and reclusive widow of your favorite author when you had the chance? Like you literally did everything including destruction and theft of property and nearly dying in a drowned basement instead of trying to communicate with people that are there and have not explicitly told you to fuck off yet. I was just waiting for them to get to that for nearly half the book so that was incredibly frustrating.

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chasinggrace's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Upon reflection, this book lived up to its positive social media reputation. I was not expecting the darker themes that are woven throughout the story (abandonment, PTSD, sexual assault, adult/minor relationships) nor did I expect the consistent use of water and architecture analogies. While the FMC character arc was slightly predictable (

a damaged, meek woman finds her voice through further trauma 👍🏼

), I think it was done well, especially when compared to

Angharad’s story

.

I thought the setting was beautiful and the world building was not overwhelming at all. The themes of colonization, classism, & religious separations were touched on, but were not overbearing. The mystery & folklore kept me intrigued, and I thought the romance was sweet (even though Preston will not be a favorite book boyfriend of mine).

Unfortunately, I needed to dock .5 stars for the writing, especially in the first 100 pages of the book. While I think similes are helpful literary tools and can be beautiful, they are completely overdone in this text. The author cannot write one singular page of this book without comparing two things and using the word “like.” Try it - flip to any page and you will find a sentence that uses this structure. While I’m not a style critic, I could not ignore it and it tainted the opening of the story. I also found Effy to be quite insufferable, before I understood her trauma. Finally, while I know Preston is self-described as unromantic,

I wish their physical intimacy could’ve been sweeter. This could have been a deliberate choice from the author to denounce the romanticizing of losing one’s virginity, or it could’ve reflected Preston’s stoic nature, but I still wanted a little more from that scene.

All together, I think this is a beautiful story that weaves dark themes with stunning comparisons to the relentlessness of water. It teaches you that you are the only one who constructs the house in which you live, if you can be strong enough to hammer the stakes yourself.

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daydaybookbay's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.75

I rated this book a 5.5 out of 10. There are many elements to this novel I enjoy, but I wish each had been explored more. By dropping the adolescent romance, more effort could be dedicated to expanding the settings and main plotlines.

Ava Reid writes beautiful phrases and sprinkles them throughout the chapters. Her artistic metaphors rest on the boundry of remaining applicable. The wording captures the reader, but any further, the intention would be lost. She uses imagery to convey emotion and the characters' mindsets.

The characters fell a bit flat for me. Each character was one dimensional and served only one purpose throughout the book. Preston exists to be an on-paper protective love interest. Effy is constantly reminding you how misogyny, sexism, and her beauty overshadow her genius. Every other character means nothing to me.

Effy's low-key racist. Her xenophobia is front and center, but we are
overlooking that? Why?! Time and time again, she shows her
academic rivalry" is really just her prejudice against Argantians.

I wanted more from the fairy-tale.

We are to believe the Fairy King is real, so why are there literally ZERO other elements involved? Everything points to Effy actually having mental health issues where she has "episodes." If Angharad was a ghost/spirit or if Effy would have seen an alternate reality through the hagstones, these would be easy places to incorporate fantasy aspects.

Is Effy a reliable narrator? Honestly, I'm left thinking the fantasy aspect is really part of Effy's imagination. She experienced great trauma from her mother, and her obsession with Myrddin's novel plays a role in her coping. I'm left to feel she really has mental health issues, and maybe the pink pills are good for her.

I know that's not the conclusion I'm "supposed" to reach, but...

I wish there had been more development in the setting and the characters. The countries, the North and South, the school, the house, the land... I could never picture them. The only thing I was able to imagine was the door to the basement. There is this whole world Reid introduced in this book, but we never get a clear picture of what it's like.

I really wanted to love this book. Part of me feels I would have enjoyed it more as a physical book because I would get bored listening to it. I never got the feeling of being immersed in the story.

I love the moody vibes Reid is able to create. The feel and the way she conveys emotion is beautiful. I wish the attention to the setting had matched. I want to visualize where the characters are and how the North/South/Bottom Hundred look and compare to each other. I wanted to pull more from the text.

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anntharai's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Jfc I went in with no expectations and only a vague idea of story as this was a reccomendation from a friend and they were right. I loved it and hated it and it made me super uncomfortable and angry as well as fired up and ready to go. I loved this reading experience.

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justinekorson's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I have mixed feelings about this story. On one hand I thought the world building was very interesting and I enjoyed the setting of this crumbling house by the ocean. On the other hand.... I could not stand Effie and all her contradictions. So let's get into a few of them.

1. Racism??? Effie "othered" Preston SO HARD. (I was listening to the audio book so I'm unsure if the narrator was saying Preston was Argatian or Argentinean. The reason I'm unsure as well is because the language that Preston spoke did not sound like Spanish but I don't know all the dialects of it so I could be wrong.) Regardless, she talked about Preston and his ethnicity USING ALL OF HIS ETHNICITY'S STEREOTYPES against him. In fact, everyone in the novel did so and when other people spoke about Preston like that Effie would get offended AS IF SHE HADN'T ALSO THOUGHT THE SAME THINGS. Preston was the only decent character in this novel and I hated the way Effie talked about him and how she said that she "always wanted him". No you didn't girl. You romanticized him so hard you forgot that you were being unfairly judgmental of a boy you barely know.

2. Effie is such a damsel in distress and is not, in her own words, a "survivor". She went through some truly awful things from men in power but in that final scene where she defeats the Fairy King and then when she attempts to save Preston from drowning... she's not doing any of the actual work. The mirror she holds up does all the work in my opinion and then when she's trying to save Preston it's not even HER that does it. She has help from (I don't know how to spell her name) the wife. She was going to GIVE UP! Tell me how that is survivalist behavior? She was going to let herself and Preston drown if the wife hadn't come along. Which is why I don't think she had much of a character ARC at all. Even at the end when she, with the help of Preston, confronts the Dean of the university, I don't believe her when she decides to argue with him. It all falls so flat for me.

3.WHY WERE THERE NO TRIGGER WARNINGS IN THIS BOOK. It talks HEAVILY about the abuse women suffer at the hands of men AND YET THERE WAS NO TRIGGER WARNINGS PAGE AT THE BEGINNING?!?! Make it make sense. I had no idea the book would talk this much about SA and if I had I could've prepared myself for that kind of mindset. As it stands, I struggled to get into this story and at some points I stopped paying attention.

I thought this book would be a five but unfortunately I was mistaken. I don't think I'm going to read anything else by this author if this story was such a disappointment.

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dyanimae's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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darlingmoira's review

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

This is not the book for me. The writing style is good, it allowed me to finish the book despite really struggling with the story.
This book is talked about as an enemies to lovers but once again hugely misses the mark! The “enemies” part relies on the main character being openly racist to her counterpart. For the majority of the book she talks and thinks about how her soon to be lover shouldn’t even be allowed to study at her school.
The plot could have been really well done if it removed that aspect of the story completely.
I have to acknowledge that the “feminist” aspects of this story are well done. How the main character handles a SA situation internally and then makes progress with dealing with it is portrayed very realistically. Everything about that part of the story is well done but otherwise book would have just been a 2 and nothing more.

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hann_smc's review against another edition

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dark funny mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

I really wanted to love it, but some things fell a little flat for me.
To start, I really did love the prose and the vibes. It was beautifully written, and the descriptions were poetic. It felt like the setting itself was another character.
It was pieces of the plot that I had more trouble with. Not even plot holes, just like "oh, that's it?" moments.
Reid really did a great job setting up for a fantastic story. I think the initial plot line of

the widow being the true author

was predictable just from the theme of

men exploiting women

that was established very early on. I genuinely don't think a predictable plot is a bad one though, and I had thought that Reid had created enough going on alongside this plot-line to really create a captivating story.
But then, nothing else really happened. There were some super interesting side plot setups:

Effy having some other worldly beauty to the point that even a random boy at the college was annoyed with her until he saw her face then promptly asked her out. Sirens and selkies were even mentioned throughout the story alongside with Effy being a changeling child, but nothing ever came of it.

The war was mentioned quite a bit, but always in passing, like it didn't actually affect anyone we knew. It seemed like the only purpose was for the Sleeper Museum to have a function, and/or for Effy to make vaguely racist comments to Preston when she was mad, but it felt very underdeveloped.

I did like that for awhile we're really not sure if Effy is crazy like everyone thinks or if the Fairy King is real, because even she isn't sure.
Some questions I do still have that people might be able to answer for me:
1.

Why didn't the widow talk to them at all? Why/How did she escape the hall without making a sound if she wasn't a ghost?

The random sex scene felt out of place. It felt less intimate and more like the precursor to a 3rd act breakup

Why was the estate guy so cagey? He was helping Preston one minute, but suspicious of them the next.

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s_wandering's review

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dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

awfully boring and terribly uninspiring

Pros:

the writing style from Reid has always been great
the general plot was interesting
the first 50 pages were intriguing
the main characters Effy and Preston (outside of their romantic plot)
the connection of
Euphemia's trauma to drowning / the event that happened in the south
really was done exceptionally well

Cons:

at the beginning its said "this is a love story" and with that in mind it felt in the haste to get these characters to fall in love it was forgotten that us as readers were just now meeting them for the first time. Their love story felt rushed, held no real weight and we could've done without it all-together
the plot became unclear, untidy, drawn out and though
the drowning was interesting- it became clear after some time it would only ever really be explored as a metaphor
I don't mind unreliable narrators but Effy was unreliable to an unforgivable point, I think this would've benefited being told by Preston's POV or at-least dual POV
so many things were introduced to set the scenery (war, timeline, characters) but never expanded on to actually provide proper world building and after 300+ pages I feel like I spent time in a world I could not identify in a line up
for a book about academia, the characters aren't that smart

to sum up the reading experience from my book club "a bit bored but intrigued"

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hello_kara's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.25

This is the longest review I have ever written, mostly driven by rage as I hated this book and the more I think about it the more I dislike it.

“Midnight was a fairytale thing. She didn’t know if Preston had been thinking about that when he promised it. But Effy was remembering all of the curses that turned princesses back to peasant girls as soon as the bells struck twelve. Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.”

“I suppose that’s partly why I don’t have much faith in the notion of permanence. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”

I liked those quotes, that’s about it.

World building was a bit confusing, and it was difficult for me to pin down a time-setting. Advertised as “Part historical fantasy, part rivals-to-lovers romance, part Gothic mystery.” It’s set in a fantasy UK inspired world, maybe from the 60s? 🤷🏼‍♀️ There’s trains, cars, universities, tanks and guns, CT scanners, phones, but also folk magic and changelings. Their country in the South is at war with the one in the North, for unknown reasons. Universities admit women, but they really only go to get husbands and aren’t allowed entry into the one discipline reversed above all others that Effy actually wants to study: Literature. Her scores were so good she should have gotten in, but because of misogyny she wasn’t admitted. She goes and studies Architecture instead (apparently the second most prestigious discipline.) As it so happens she is the ONLY woman in that college.

Effy has a woman roommate, who attends the music college and has a girlfriend, which is never addressed again after the first chapter. But also there’s major purity culture. Effy is always being hit on by the men at college, who are simultaneously aroused and disgusted by her, calling her whore. Why? Oh the Dean of her college has sexually assaulted her, so obviously she must’ve slept her way in to the college.

It’s not all bad though! (🙄)She sees a poster for a competition to design a remodel of her (late) favorite author’s home. The author in question is now instated as a Sleeper, one of seven revered national storytellers believed to have magic that protects their country. There’s a museum with the corpses of the Sleepers on display, which is the countries biggest tourist attraction, (and yet belief in Sleeper magic is 50/50? Is it real or not?! If it’s just an old wives tale then why do the bodies not rot, why would they induct a new dead guy onto the roster?)

But I digress, Effy goes to the university library to do some research on the author (even though she knows his works ‘better than anyone’) and finds that all the books have been checked out by a Literature student. She’s pissed, and very jealous. He has a “Northern” name, and she wonders why he gets to study her Southern hero author and not her. Thus begins the “rivalry.” She also thinks to herself that none of the other architecture students would be worthy of winning, because she’s the only one who truly loves that author’s works, despite him being a national treasure.

And suddenly she wins! A first year student who’s failing half her classes and hates architecture! Her roommate calls her out on this and says don’t you think that’s kind of weird? Nope! She’s like 18/19 years old, with no support from family (her mom like actually hates her and basically tells her to never call again), and decides what could possibly go wrong?! She gets approval to take time off of school to go to the end of the world to work on designs for this house (but wait, I thought you had to submit your design plan for the competition??) Once she gets to the house ~SURPRISE~ she meets the Lit student who borrowed all those books! Preston. So she hates him right away and is downright mean to him. The homeowner/son of dead author starts talking to her about the plans and construction etc.(SHES NOT A FUCKING GENERAL CONTRACTOR) He’s really weird about her being around Preston, but also makes suggestive remarks towards her.

If the book wanted me to think “men are trash,” it succeeded. It was so misogynistic. Effy is not allowed to study literature on account of women’s feeble and trivial little brains. Annoyingly, just about every man Effy comes into contact with tries to make a move on her because she’s just so ‘otherworldly beautiful,’ but in the same breath call her whore. Preston is the love interest, but he gives major “I’m just brutally honest!” vibes. He gets brownie points from Effy because he didn’t immediately come on to her (ladies, the bar is SUBTERRANEAN.) But at one point even Preston was basically like ‘yeah I totally would’ve ducked you already if I didn’t actually like you’ (wtf?)

There was a definite creepy vibe, with the setting being a decrepit manor that was falling apart and into the sea. And yet… Water had overtaken the foundation, but it’s also up on the cliffs? So that was confusing. And the whole architecture competition, but she didn’t have designs drafted or finished? How did she win? Oh never mind, it doesn’t matter because it was all a plot by the Fairy King to claim her.

I read a lot of fantasy, so I can generally adjust my sense of realism accordingly. But this one just didn’t land for me, the inconsistency in whether or not magic of any kind was real in this world really bothered me. For a while I thought we were going to get to the end and find out she had hallucinated the whole thing!

Effy has been on meds for most of her life, due to nightmares and visions of the Fairy King. She is a changeling, her mother left her for dead by the river, and the Fairy King came to claim her. But her mother came back a took her before she could fully be claimed. In the process she lost her ring finger from fairy magic. So she found comfort in the fairy tale, feeling ‘not like the other girls.’ She knew the story in and out, loved it, saw herself in it. It was her entire personality.

But why is this story the country’s national treasure? This fairy tale about a woman who is stolen away by the Fairy King and forced to marry him, written from a woman’s POV? This story that got the male author credited with writing it into like the National Hall of Fame of a country that won’t allow women to study literature because it is ‘beyond their capacity to comprehend.’

~spoilers~ it was written by a woman. A hidden truth that would never have been uncovered if it were not for Effy. She and Preston write up their findings to present to the college. She gets into the college of Literature for her contribution, and simultaneously gets her former Dean fired.

Effy sees the true author of the story. She asks her to autograph her well worn copy of the book, they smile, triumphant. The end.

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