A Study in Drowning

• Author: Ava Reid
• Genre: YA Fantasy
• Publication Date: September 19, 2023
• Publisher: HarperTeen

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperTeen for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: sexual assault, misogyny, xenophobia, blood, violence, unhealthy relationship dynamics

Effy Sayre has always believed in fairy tales. She’s had no choice. Since childhood, she’s been haunted by visions of the Fairy King. She’s found solace only in the pages of Angharad – author Emrys Myrddin’s beloved epic about a mortal girl who falls in love with the Fairy King, and then destroys him.

Effy’s tattered, dog-eared copy is all that’s keeping her afloat through her stifling first term at Llyr’s prestigious architecture college. So when Myrddin’s family announces a contest to design the late author’s house, Effy feels certain this is her destiny.

But Hiraeth Manor is an impossible task: a musty, decrepit estate on the brink of crumbling into a hungry sea. And when Effy arrives, she finds she isn’t the only one who’s made a temporary home there. Preston Héloury, a stodgy young literature scholar, is studying Myrddin’s papers and is determined to prove her favorite author is a fraud.

As the two rival students investigate the reclusive author’s legacy, piecing together clues through his letters, books, and diaries, they discover that the house’s foundation isn’t the only thing that can’t be trusted. There are dark forces, both mortal and magical, conspiring against them – and the truth may bring them both to ruin.

This was one of the books that I was really looking forward to reading, and it wound up being one of the biggest disappointments of this year for me. I had a lot of issues with this book, but let me start by discussing the things that I liked first.

Reid’s writing is absolutely gorgeous. She has a way with words and this book is clearly a love letter to those books that readers fall in love with and derive comfort from. I think we can all identify with comfort reads, and having that one book that we can always turn to that makes us feel better, no matter what is going on. Even better if it’s a book that we can see ourselves in, and that’s exactly what Reid centers this story on—a book that the MC sees herself in and has fallen in love with, reading it so many times that she has it memorized forwards and backwards.

However, these positives weren’t enough to save the book for me. There’s an issue I found that wasn’t addressed and made me feel uncomfortable while reading, and that’s Effy’s xenophobia and prejudice towards Preston, simply because he is Argantian. She’s constantly putting him down because of it, and decides that he doesn’t deserve to be in the literature college simply because of where he comes from before she’s even spoken to him. It’s never brought up in the book, and the way she acts towards him isn’t challenged at any point. Just like someone acting like that in real life would make me feel uncomfortable to the point that I’d say something, reading about this made me feel unsettled when it wasn’t addressed.

I struggled with Preston a lot, because his character was flat. There wasn’t much to him that made him feel like a unique person, rather than a place filler. While there’s a romance that is supposed to develop between Effy and Preston during the story, it never felt genuine to me. There wasn’t really any development of emotions, and it never felt like they connected on a level outside of discussing literature—I didn’t understand where the romance came into the picture. 

It’s made clear throughout the course of the story that Effy has experienced sexual assault at the hands of a professor, and has a lot of trauma to work through. She perseverates a lot on her mental health, her school issues, and the research they are doing into her favorite book, but I still found her to be a relatively flat character. Even more concerning, the consensual sex that Effy does have in the book is still referred to as a ‘tender assault,’ making it sound like it’s harmful anyway. In that vein, it’s supposed to be a YA book, but it read as more of an adult story to me, with the heavy themes, the characters who are both embarking on their adult lives, and the way the story was told.

Throughout the story, there were times when it felt like Reid hadn’t done any research into the subject matter. Effy is a first semester architecture student who is struggling in her classes, yet she somehow knows all she needs to know to design a new house for the estate of her favorite author? And when she gets there and realizes that it’s nothing like what she expected, she can still manage to handle it all? In addition, one of the characters is referred to as a changeling, but the explanation is absolutely nothing like what a changeling actually is. 

Even worse, this book was boring. Large portions of the read were slow-moving and didn’t do anything to advance the plot, and I found myself often putting the book down and having a tough time picking it up again. It took me an excessively long time to read this book, and I was disappointed to see that it’s being promoted as dark academia when the story is only set in a school for the very beginning, and then she’s off to a crumbling mansion in the middle of nowhere. This book focused more on vibes and beating the reader over the head with her heavy themes of trauma, sexual assault by powerful, older men, and misogyny, instead of relying on character development and a strong plot that isn’t predictable from the start. Overall, this wasn’t a great read for me, and I’m probably going to skip her other books.