TandeWrites

Today, in honour of me committing to reviewing all of my favourite reads of every year so far, we’re going to be reviewing A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft, a book that was simultaneously one of my most anticipated releases of the year and a book I knew nothing about, just that I was completely enchanted by the cover when it was first revealed.

Lorelei, a folklorist with a quick temper and quicker wit, is on an expedition with six eccentric nobles in search of a magical spring which promises untold power and may reunite their politically fractured kingdom. She’s determined to prove herself and make her dream of becoming a naturalist and being able to travel the lands freely come true. However, the expedition goes awry when its leader—Lorelei’s beloved mentor—is murdered on the first night aboard their ship, and the only person Lorelei suspects must be innocent is Sylvia, her longtime academic rival. They must find the spring before the murderer strikes again, but other dangers lurk in the forests that rearrange themselves at night, rivers with dragons sleeping beneath the water, and shapeshifting beasts out for blood. As Lorelei and Sylvia grudgingly work together to uncover the truth—and resist their growing feelings for one another—they discover that their professor had secrets of her own. Secrets that make Lorelei question whether justice is worth pursuing, or if this kingdom is worth saving at all.

This book is promoted as dark academia, but it’s more of a folklore-influenced adventurous murder mystery with a hint of sapphic romance and a very distant side of dark academia elements. It’s dark academia adjacent at best. The characters are academics, but this book doesn’t really explore academia as a subject or an institution. It’s used more as a descriptor for the characters’ jobs and actions rather than a theme of the book.

I really enjoyed Allison Saft’s prose in this book, and now I’m desperate to devour more of her works to experience it again. The writing is excellent on a line-by-line level and she creates these incredibly beautiful mystical landscapes very evocatively without being too purple or overpowering the plot. It’s very accessible to readers who are starting to dip into the adult fantasy genre. Lorelei tells a lot of German-inspired folktales that contribute to the beauty of this world and they’re woven in throughout the story in a mostly organic way. The reason for each story being told makes sense within the context of each scene, and I didn’t feel like the plot was being slowed down by this extra information.

I think that Lorelei is an excellent main character. She’s not very likeable at all (neither are any of the characters, honestly), and definitely not easy to cheer for as a narrator, but that’s what endeared her to me. I found her to have an incredibly refreshing voice. She holds a lot of bitterness within her, and it comes from an interesting place: she is this world’s equivalent of being Jewish, and she’s had to build herself a prickly exterior to protect herself from being looked down upon and mistrusted because of that. I like that we got to see Lorelei’s struggles with being in this world and how the antisemitism she’s subjected to throughout her life changed her as a person, and especially her attachment to her mentor who provides a reprieve from the discrimination. I really felt her perspective and could feel this granular pettiness that she has that is sometimes justified and sometimes not. I like that she has an arc where she changes as a character, she doesn’t lose her prickliness or necessarily become nicer, but she does become better.

This book is for the yearners. I’m not usually one for romance, but I instantly bought the chemistry between Lorelei and Sylvia, Sylvia being the whimsical swordswoman who feels like she could be a character straight out of one of Lorelei’s folktales. The author does a great job of making the relationship feel like a slow burn even though this is a relatively short story, but I understand that you have to be one of the readers who buys in from the beginning to feel like this was done effectively. I am infatuated by the dynamic where one character believes that they can’t possibly be loved and the other finds loving them to be the easiest thing in the world. I savoured this romance.

One of the issues I had with this book is similar to one that I had with A Study in Drowning: the world-building and the politics fall flat in comparison to everything else. The benefit of this is that there’s no overwhelming info-dumping and you learn a lot of the world’s lore along the way through Lorelei’s folktales, but there are a lot of things that don’t really make sense, and a few minor things that felt inconsistent. I don’t think the book is interested in pretending like it has a strong plot—the rivals-to-lovers romance is the most developed and intriguing plotline, more than the murder mystery and the adventure despite the romance being a subplot. To me, it feels as if the book ends before there’s been any resolution of the political stakes that have been introduced, and the politics were supposed to be the main motivation of the expedition. The book ends when Lorelei’s arc has been resolved, but we don’t find out what happens to her people or the states seeking independence within this world, so it left me wondering about the significance of introducing these states in the first place. The world at the end of the book is the same as it was at the start.

This is the book for you if you’re going into it because you’re interested in the characters, the sapphic rivals-to-lovers relationship, and the vague academic atmosphere like I was. But, if you’re looking for a fantasy book that sufficiently weaves together personal arcs with broader world-building and politics, then this might be a book you want to avoid.

If you’ve read A Dark and Drowning Tide, I’m curious to hear your thoughts as this has become a polarising book for me. I’m very interested to see what Alison Saft writes in the future, but I might be more hesitant to pick up her next book depending on what the subject is.