Sylvie Cathrall

TITLE: A Letter to the Luminous Deep

AUTHOR: Sylvie Cathrall

RATING:

A Letter to the Luminous Deep is about two penpals who discover something amazing about their world. It follows their letters, and the letters written by those who came afterwards, trying to figure out what happened.

This book took me longer to read than any book I’ve read in months. Although I can usually read a third of a book in a sitting, easy, it was painful for me to read even 5-10% of this one. Why? Let me elaborate.

This book is written fully in letters. Although I’ve seen this done well before, this book does not do it well. There’s almost no tension in the book because the reader is so far distanced from the main actions. Literally huge parts of this book are letters written about other letters, so you’re getting this second or third hand, and it completely negates any excitement it might have had otherwise.

Secondly, this book is verbose and the writing is very flowery. I don’t mind a little of that here and there, but I got very tired of it in this book. It would have been nice once in a while if the author would have just told us what was actually going on because it was more than a little confusing.

Thirdly, even with the overwhelming amounts of exposition in this book, I had trouble understanding exactly what was going on. There’s so much stuff thrown at you, especially towards the end, that is not adequately explained. There’s apparently a sequel coming (which I won’t be reading) so hopefully at least that can be fixed.

Finally, the ‘cliffhanger’ ending. I put quotes around it because it is literally the most boring cliffhanger I have ever read. It’s more accurately just an end to the book that doesn’t wrap up, well, anything. The entire ending of the book is just as open and unsolved as the rest of it, which annoyed me to no end.

So, while I cannot in good conscience recommend this book, I do hope that there are those out there who enjoy it more than I did.

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