Monday, November 2, 2020

The Deep by Alma Katsu

Something is haunting the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage. Before anyone can figure out what is truly causing so many disturbing events on the ship, disaster strikes and the story we know of the Titanic takes over the page.

This story follows maid Annie Hebbley, a woman haunted by her survival, who is now on the Brittanic, working as a nurse on the ship that has been made over into a hospital ship during World War 1. Annie's memories of her past are vague but when she happens across a soldier she recognizes as a survivor of that horrible night, she realizes that there was more to the disaster than she realized. Annie needs to figure out what haunted that maiden voyage because now it is following the Brittanic, and it is ready to cause tragedy all over again.

I want to rate this higher but as to the way this unfolded, I admit I ended up disappointed by the reveals. I got to about the 3/4 mark and I was still wondering what I was supposed to be interested in, who I was meant to support. I was sometimes even tempted to put the book down.

The book opened on an interesting note, showing what has happened to lead character Annie Hebbley since the tragic sinking of the Titanic four years earlier. Annie ends up taking a post as a nurse on the Britannic and from there, the story seems to lose its steam. I could not connect to Annie at all and while I could understand that she was more in line with the idea of an unreliable narrator, there was not enough to keep me invested in her wants and needs. Once the reader sees the reveal, it feels like there was a lot of missed opportunities to build that tension and make the ending have more of an impact.

Too much information necessary to the supernatural aspects of the novel was kept too close to the chest, stayed hidden for too long that in the end, the reveal almost feels like a last minute change. To me, it feels like the ending comes out of nowhere after the story dragged too long with various characters on that ill-fated ship. Readers know what is going to happen and even with that hanging over the story's head, the whole middle dragged.

The good news is that from everything I have seen, The Hunger by Alma Katsu has all the chills and eerie circumstances I was in search of in this book and thankfully I have that in my library. I'll be reading it soon. 

 

Rating on my Blog Scale: 3.5 Stars. Seriously, I wanted so many more horrifying circumstances to this book. If you're looking for scary deep sea adventures that will keep you up at night, read the novella Rolling in the Deep and it's sequel, the full-length novel Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant. Because of the monsters in those stories, I will NEVER go out into the ocean.

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