Reviews

The Drowning Summer by C.L. Herman

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taurusrising's review

adventurous mysterious reflective tense fast-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

4.0

I really enjoyed this book. I often feel that the summary of a book can give away a lot of the plot, but I was delighted to find that I never was able to anticipate what would happen next, which made this a real page turner for me.
I thought the world building of the supernatural was well done in The Drowning Summer as each element was well thought out and explained. It made everything easy to follow as everything made sense. Additionally, I love how versatile this read was genre-wise. It had elements of fantasy/sci-fi, romance, mystery and thriller. It kept the book interesting throughout as it never once felt flat.
However, the only thing I didn’t love about the book was how the subject of bisexuality was written. It wasn’t that it was necessarily bad, but I felt that the way it was brought up was a bit juvenile and repetitive. It seemed to only have been described to foreshadow the relationship between Mina and Evelyn, but did not contribute to their personalities as characters. I wish the author would’ve either made their identities impact the characters more, or simply left out the disclaimers of their bisexuality and let their relationship occur more organically.

spudnugs96's review

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful inspiring 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? No

4.0

milkteaser's review against another edition

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4.0

a beautiful and spooky sapphic beach read

_krys_'s review

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It got too boring. There was a lack of plots and too much internal dialouge with descriptions :(

punkgremlin's review

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dark fast-paced

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

3.25

optimisticbooknerd's review against another edition

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3.0

3 ⭐

The synopsis and cover had me so invested and intrigued to pick it up but maybe I'm falling out of the range for YA. I'm always down for gay/sapphic stories especially if they're horrorish sounding but this was just meh to me?

I tried the devouring grey a long time ago and it was a DNF so idk.