Took me a while because I've suffered from HPL malaise & overexposure to Cthulhu my this stuff. Despite that, the book has a slow start but once it finds its legs a few chapters in, this book takes hold & doesn't let go.

I never thought I'd be able to empathize with Deep Ones or worshippers of the Old Ones. This author & book proved me wrong. Great details that mesh Innsmouth & Miskatonic into history & geography alike. I'm eagerly awaiting the next novel.... ( )

Eye-opening and quietly riveting. While it's built on a trope, the story rarely feels tricky or preachy. In fact, what made the book compelling is that the central character, Aphra, feels tremendously real -- her prickliness and sadness, her yearning, and her warmth in turns. The writing is gently baroque, a nod to Lovecraft, but it happens to perfectly convey Aphra's internal world, where every decision needs to be thought and rethought, where there's always someone who knows more than you do and won't tell, and where ancient wisdom is as real as the cold war. The writer does a wonderful job of conveying that tension. Excited to read more in this series. ( )

Excellent. ( )

The premise is more interesting than the execution, and the last third of the book started dragging for me. ( )

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Gabra Zackman. Although I have some complaints, she wasn’t unpleasant to listen to and for the most part her narration worked for me. Her delivery had a slightly flat tone, which I thought kind of fit well, but I found it a little jarring with some of the character dialogue. I also had some trouble distinguishing between some of her character voices, but there were quite a lot of regularly-seen characters and the text mostly made it clear who was speaking, so it wasn’t a big problem. Probably my biggest issue was that I sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between the main character speaking out loud or thinking in her head.

Story
Although I didn’t realize it while listening to the story, this is based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. I learned this at the end of the book in the author’s notes. I’m Cthulhu Clueless, so all of that went over my head, but I never felt lost nor like I was missing out on important back story, so the author did a good job providing enough information for readers like me to appreciate it. I don’t know if that means that somebody who is familiar with it might get bored by too much information they already knew.

In this book there are three types of humans. “People of the Air” are regular humans like you and me. Well, like me anyway. I don’t know what you are. There are also “People of the Rock”, known as the “mad ones”. They are supposedly no longer around, but I know a lot of people I suspect may be related to them. The main character, Aphra, is one of the “People of the Water”, a longer-lived species that grows up living on land but whose bodies eventually transform and then they live deep in the ocean. Due to lies told about them, most of the people of the water who had still been living on land were killed, or died in concentration camps. Aphra and her younger brother are the only ones left. They’re asked by government agents to help them investigate rumors that a Russian spy has learned the magical art of body swapping. Since this is of some concern to them, and it also means they’ll be given access to some of their old and treasured books which were stolen from them, they agree to help.

The story has a very slow pace. It moderately held my interest, but I got exasperated at how little actual effort the characters put into their supposed objective. I mean, I get that Aphra and Caleb had ulterior motives and were interested in all their books, but their research methods, including that of the people who were more invested in the mission, seemed inefficient and haphazard. That part of the plot never really went anywhere, actually. Maybe it does in a sequel. I felt like the story had potential, and it had interesting moments, but I was never sucked into it.

I kind of liked the characters, they were mostly interesting, but I never got super attached to any of them either. There were quite a lot of them, but they were mostly distinct enough that I was able to keep track of who was who. What I did have trouble with, on the other hand, was keeping track of who was supposed to be in the current scene. It seemed like people kept cropping up who I hadn’t realized were there, or I just found myself wondering who was there in the first place. I’m not sure if this was because I have more trouble keeping track of the details when listening to an audiobook, or if things were unclear with the writing.

This will be a “probably not” for following up on the series in print. I liked it ok, but I think not enough to read more books in the setting. Someday I should probably read some Lovecraft stuff though so I can better appreciate its presence in modern literature. ( )