Scholte has landed solidly on my auto-buy list.

filled star filled star filled star filled star star unfilled
meigan Avatar

By

I absolutely loved Four Dead Queens when I read it last year, and I’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for whatever else Scholte decided to grace us with. I had zero clue what The Vanishing Deep was about when I saw the cover for it many months ago, I just saw the name and knew I had to read it. When I finally read the synopsis I knew that Scholte was giving us yet another incredibly unique story, and one that was bound to have as many twists as Queens did.

The Vanishing Deep takes place quite a bit into the future after an apocalyptic event causes most land masses, including mountains, to be submerged underwater. Humans are adaptable creatures and they’ve built on any land that remains, and they’ve resourcefully built floating cities. Many people in these floating cities are divers, seeking treasures and baubles of life past. Tempe is one such diver and she’s on a mission to make as many notes as possible from said treasures in order to partake in another aspect of this super interesting and watery world — the ability to see her dead sister once again, thanks to a (very expensive) program that can revive the dead for 24 hours.

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tales will forever be my jam, and I’m always blown away by how authors choose to end the world as we know it. What made The Vanishing Deep have a little extra creep to it was the plausibility of the storyline. Sea levels have risen quite a bit already, it’s only a matter of time before we experience something like Scholte’s event, albeit on a much smaller scale. Hopefully. Aside from the world-ending event, I absolutely loved the antagonist in this book. I love when the enemy is an entity, a corporation, or some such giant institution, because it always makes the conflict seem that much more tense. And tense it certainly was, thanks to the many (many!) twists and turns thrown in along the way.

The only thing I had a hard time grasping with this book were the floating cities — I couldn’t picture how they worked, what they looked like, how they protect it, etc., and and it was rather confusing at times. Other than that, this was a perfect post-apocalyptic tale filled with dimensional characters and a super interesting storyline, and it’s definitely a book I’ll recommend. Scholte has made it to my auto-buy list and I can’t wait to see what she brings next.

*ARC received courtesy of BookishFirst and the publisher.