Auroch’s Reviews > A Song Below Water > Status Update

If feels like everything I've liked about 'Tithe' is balanced by everything I hate about 'A Song Below Water' in equal measure. The combination of valley girl dialogue and over-explaining how the magic mixes with history but doesn't actually change history really irks me. It's also one of those urban fantasies where every magic creature possible has been crammed in at every available opportunity.

While I get that the author is prioritizing her siren/BLM metaphor over actual plot, for me it's reached a 'jumped the shark' point where the ren fair sub-plot comes in. It just scrambles the metaphor so fully that I've more or less dropped this book for the time being. I'm going to finish reading "Spin the Dawn" and "Too Much and Never Enough" before attempting to continue lest I immediately DNF.

Aside from that first chapter this whole book is dragging so hard. In addition to Tav's non-stop lectures and the overall clunky world building, I've also found that I just don't like Effie's chapters at all. They read like filler and don't seem to be going anywhere. The result is that I'm just not liking anything going on at the moment and am debating DNFing this.

Also, I'm also not a fan of how the world building was handled. It's now explicitly urban-fantasy-in-the-suburbs with the lack of background that genre tends to involve which completely messes up the siren/BLM metaphors they're trying to set up. It tries to dump sirens in modern times, but also have this big historical quasi-magic racism background that contradicts the basic premise. Thus far disappointed. (2/2)

So the problems I noticed in the beginning are starting to cannibalize the story...While I was promised sirens with a side of racial injustice metaphors, it's actually 95% tumblr-influenced political/racial monologue (bordering on rants) and 5% sirens bent so severely around the tumblr talking points that it feels more like a lecture than an actual story. (1/2)

So... While the concept is interesting it's apparent only one chapter in that this is one of those YA books that assumes teen readers are morons who need to be hit with a brick to get metaphors as there is no subtlety whatsoever. The story isn't bad, but that aspect of the writing style is making it a bit hard for me to get into. I hope this improves, but don't expect it to.