I read Astrid Scholte's first book, Four Dead Queens, and I absolutely loved it. It was gripping, full of twists and turns that I didn't see, and it gave a brand new meaning to the term "unreliable narrator".
Therefore, when I heard about the Vanishing Deep, I expected something of the same caliber as Four Dead Queens - or even a better book. The synopsis of the Vanishing Deep seemed to hint at the promise of being better than Four Dead Queens. Unfortunately, it was not.
Where Four Dead Queens was fleshed out and full of unique cultural differences in the four nations, the Vanishing Deep felt flat and lacked any real difference between the people who lived on reefs and those who lived on the island.
My biggest issue with the Vanishing Deep, however, was the ending. In Four Dead Queens, the ending is something you didn't see coming but looking back on the book you realize it was being hinted at all along. In the Vanishing Deep, this other island that the parents are on is mentioned once or twice but there's nothing else to indicate that they are still alive. In fact, it would have been a much better ending had they been dead the whole time, it would have made the character sacrifices and arcs worth all the pain and suffering they went through. But, to have the parents still be alive at the end made the whole book feel like a comic book when they kill off a main character, but the readers all know that that character will come back to life within the next few issues.
Therefore, when I heard about the Vanishing Deep, I expected something of the same caliber as Four Dead Queens - or even a better book. The synopsis of the Vanishing Deep seemed to hint at the promise of being better than Four Dead Queens. Unfortunately, it was not.
Where Four Dead Queens was fleshed out and full of unique cultural differences in the four nations, the Vanishing Deep felt flat and lacked any real difference between the people who lived on reefs and those who lived on the island.
My biggest issue with the Vanishing Deep, however, was the ending. In Four Dead Queens, the ending is something you didn't see coming but looking back on the book you realize it was being hinted at all along. In the Vanishing Deep, this other island that the parents are on is mentioned once or twice but there's nothing else to indicate that they are still alive. In fact, it would have been a much better ending had they been dead the whole time, it would have made the character sacrifices and arcs worth all the pain and suffering they went through. But, to have the parents still be alive at the end made the whole book feel like a comic book when they kill off a main character, but the readers all know that that character will come back to life within the next few issues.