(Remember, not going to be Normal about this). I love her, I feel protective of her, and I will lay down my life for her. She’s not a perfect character, she has very real flaws beyond the sometimes trite “quirks that a romantic partner will find cute,” and it’s part of what makes her authentic and leaves room through the writing for real growth.Īlmost as soon as I started this book I knew there was no chance that I was going to be Normal about it. That it’s strength enough to survive and that the ways we find to make it through the day are valid. She’s not going to pick up a sword and get a training montage to defeat her enemies on a battlefield, she’s not always going to have the right quip at just the right time, and she’s not always going to have the right answers, but she shows that there’s a strength in softness. The “life has made my fight or flight response heavily weighted toward flight for my own survival” femmes. The “I’ve been rehearsing my Starbucks order since I got in line” femmes. Survival is bravery, too.Įffy Sayre is for the soft femmes. On the note of characters, I can’t not speak about the main character, Effy. A seamless blend of narrative, characters I absolutely loved, mysteries to unravel, and an ambiguously fantastical setting that you will question again and again. This book will have you questioning perceptions of reality and not knowing who or what to believe.Īnd all of it works so beautifully.

It’s about all the ways your voice can be taken from you - both by others and eaten away at within yourself - and what it takes to get it back, if you can.Īll of this is wrapped within a Dark Academia tale of mystery and romance (of the academic rivals variety) in a rotting old house on a cliff, intertwined with themes of the disconnect between religious, superstitious folklore and academic agnosticism. It’s about stories and the relationship between author and reader about who really owns a story and decides what it means. It’s about institutional sexism in academia about how young women are simultaneously treated as too insipid and frivolous to be of any consequence and yet also held responsible for the predation of the men who demand power over them. There is a lot going on in A Study in Drowning. You can lose that too, slowly, like water eating away at stone. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment.

A study in drowning by ava reid