The Wicked Deep || Book Review

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36697848-the-wicked-deep

Rating: 4.75/5 

Plot: 

" The Swan season has begun. And this little town tucked along the shore will not come out unharmed. "

The small town of Sparrow,Oregon, has spent the past two centuries haunted by the ghosts of its past. After the murder of the three Sparrow sisters in 1822 after finding them guilty of witchcraft, the spirits of the girls crawl out of the water each summer to take revenge on the town. Each summer, the sisters take over the bodies of three local girls and lure boys,locals and tourists alike to their deaths in the waters surrounding Sparrow. From the small Lumiere Island, Penny Talbot has followed these events unfold each summer throughout her life and has accepted the fate of her town. That is, until Bo, a mysterious boy, stumbles into the town in the middle of the Swan season and Penny is forced to make difficult choices in order to protect him for meeting his untimely demise.

My thoughts:

For the sake of transparency, I must first of all let you all know that I was sent an early copy of the book by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

However, the key word here is honest, so my thoughts and feelings on the book are in no way shape or form affected by that.

Now that that is out of the way,I must start off by saying that I was in love with this book and I felt just as captivated by the story as the poor town girls did by the vengeful Swan sisters taking over their bodies. My expectations for the book somehow got way higher than I would have liked (high expectations usually call for disappointment,ya' feel?), since I am pretty much always looking for this kind of book; what can I say, I live for the dark and twisted. However, those same expectations were not only met, but overcome.

The Wicked Deep truly does tick all the boxes it promises it will.

First of all, because of the way the story is constructed, the town of Sparrow itself feels like this larger than life figure looming over the characters. The city is that is at the center of it all, though you might argue otherwise. The major thing I suppose I was looking for from this book was a powerful setting and powerful it was. The writing in itself is very atmospheric, you feel like you are right there in the middle of it both when it is about Sparrow or the Lumiere Island looming in the near distance; both settings feels vivid and authentic, their contours taking shape in the back of your mind and stealing your breath away.

Another atmosphere and setting related thing that I highly,highly  loved and thought worked perfectly in the story was the fact that the town of Sparrow and the island have a very timeless vibe to them, they feel both aged and affected by the passing of time, but also somehow suspended in time and space; it feels as if they don't conform to the confines of time, something that is settled early on:

" Our small town is sheltered from the outside world,trapped in time."

 Sparrow feels very much like a darker,more twisted fairytale setting had it been spoiled by the greed of villains and not saved by some luminous princess.

Which makes a great excuse to move nicely into my next point. Especially towards the latter half of the book, there are some serious traditional Little Mermaid vibes that I am getting. Not the watered (lmao,get it,get it?) down version of it, but rather the in depth, quite dark in itself original version of it, which I highly appreciated. The way those ideas were woven into the story and somehow modernised despite keeping their core meaning was wonderfully crafted.

I also quite liked the way the book explores morality. From the very beginning nothing feels black and white, especially through the modern filter. Were the sisters really the villainous figures that they were meant to be when they were alive? Or was it rather the townsfolk that were the villains of this story? Was it a little bit of both? What are the lines the town is willing to cross to get rid of the souls of the sisters still haunting them all?

I thought the author did a great job in shaping all the sisters as characters and making them take shape into the reader's mind both as individuals and as a collective entity. They all felt like they had their thing, which you kind of really need to see them as individuals as well instead of simply "the Swan sisters"; it added more depth to them and I was very much here for that.

I really enjoyed Penny and Bo as characters in themselves and I thought seeing Penny's mother, though alive, loom like a bit of a lost spirit herself through the story was a very nice touch. I also really liked seeing the way Penny and Bo interacted develop as opposed to the insta-lovey approach. There were actually some very nice paragraphs that mark the stages of that relationship that I couldn't help but mark down because it were breathtaking.

I gotta say, the most striking thing from my notes for this review was, and I am giving you an exact quote here, "the romance is iffy,  but at least there are cats". You're welcome.

Overall, I'm quite adamant about my love for this book and I cannot wait for it to be officially out into the wild for more people to start talking about it, so shoutout to Simon& Schuster UK for letting me have a copy of it early.

The Wicked Deep hits shelves on March 6th