Book Review | Those We Drown

When Liv lands an all-expenses-paid opportunity to study aboard the luxury liner, at first, it seems like a dream come true. However, she feels like a fish out of water amongst all the other wealthier passengers, and when her best friend goes missing aboard the ship, she must untangle its dark mysteries before it’s too late.

Those We Drown by Amy Goldsmith takes an interesting concept (deadly sirens aboard a cruise ship!) and spoils it with bafflingly poor writing. I mean it when I say that the descriptions in this book are so bizarre and ineffective that it kept breaking my immersion instead of painting a picture for the reader.

Let's look at the opening scene, for instance:

"Silence slunk down the now-deserted corridors under the impassive gaze of buzzing wall lamps. Blandly uniform doors yawned into empty rooms, raggedly stripped to their bare bones."

What purpose does this serve? Aren't cabin doors on a ship typically uniform anyway? This tells the reader nothing they won't already assume. Also, unless there's a draft swinging the doors open, "yawned," doesn't work as a metaphor here.

Here's another example:

"Everywhere I turned, I was confronted by acres of politely pale wood, almost plastic-looking in its perfection."

What does that even mean??? How can wood be politely pale? Also, having your character see “acres” of wood inside a confined ship does the exact opposite of establishing a claustrophobic setting.

To top it off, the characters in this book are vapid and superficial and mostly preoccupied with their looks, and not in a fun, satirical way, which made it difficult for me to care about whether any of them lived or died.

All in all, this was an incredibly frustrating read, and not even its fleeting moments of cool body horror were enough to save this sinking ship of a novel.

Thank you, NetGalley and Delacorte Press, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book Details:

Publication Date : Jun 27, 2023

Publisher : Delacorte Press

ISBN: 059357009X

Pages : 416

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