The Girl The Sea Gave Back

This Post is Spoiler Free!

Alright. Bear with me here. I have mixed feelings about The Girl The Sea Gave Back. There were parts about it that I absolutely loved, but there were also parts that nearly made me put it down, which is a bit rare. I honestly think that if I were the DNFing (Did Not Finish) type, this book would have been one of them. BUT! I hate leaving things unfinished, so I pushed through, and I’m not too upset that I did.

I know… I’m going in circles… This is just how the book made me feel, okay?

Let’s start with what I liked: the story. Even through the parts of the book that had me annoyed, I was always invested in the story. I wanted to know what happened, and I quite liked the way everything played out. The pacing was a little awkward at times, but the story itself was good. 

Also, this book was told from the first person perspective of two different people, with a few random chapters here and there told in third person that held memories (aka exposition). I loved the two different perspectives. I think the only problem I ever had with it is sometimes the same scene was told from both perspectives, and it felt a little redundant. However, those scenes were few enough where it didn’t bother me too much.

What did bother me was the inconsistency of the timeline. A lot of this story is told via memory, and there were a couple of times that events on the timeline didn’t match up and… uuuuuugggghhhhhh… At one point, something happened two moon cycles before the present, and later in the book it happened two years before the present. Another thing happened 13 years before present and later in the book it happened 10 years before the present. The inconsistency had me doubting so much, and I ended up rereading too many chapters to see whether it was the book or my memory that was off. Let me tell you, it was the book. If you have evidence to prove I’m wrong, please tell me, because if I am wrong, I don’t want to go around disliking a book because of it. But… I don’t think I’m wrong.

The second thing that bothered me was actually something I noticed a small amount of in Sky in the Deep. The writing style, for a while, seemed to treat each chapter like it was the beginning of a new book. It was a little too full of ‘hook’ lines and questions and half-hints at what was really happening. It made it kind of difficult to get into the story, which really isn’t something I did until about two-thirds of the way through it. I’m not sure if this is just a personal taste thing on my part, but yeah. Between that and the inconsistencies, I nearly had to put the book down.

Really, the story was this book’s saving grace for me. I liked where it began, and I liked where it ended. It had one of those sorta open endings that leaves you feeling like, “Yeah, life totally goes on after this,” and then you go on with your own life. I like those endings. Those endings are probably my favorite. Would I read this book again? Eh. I don’t think so. Am I upset that I continued reading it? Nope. Am I mad that I picked it up in the first place? Definitely not. So there it is… My mixed feelings review of The Girl The Sea Gave Back

The Girl The Sea Gave Back by Adrienne Young

My Next Read:

And I Darken by Kiersten White