The Sea is Salt and So Am I / Cassandra Hartt / Book Review

The Sea is Salt and So Am I

Blurb

West Finch is one hurricane away from falling into the sea, but Harlow Prout is determined to keep her seaside town afloat. She spends her days campaigning, planning, plotting, scheming--all to get the residents on board. But the town itself isn't the only thing at risk of falling beneath the waves. Harlow's best friend Ellis MacQueen is more likely to run from problems than face them, and his twin brother Tommy is knee deep in depression, one wave from being overwhelmed. When a potentially-devastating storm hits West Finch, Tommy sets out on a swim he doesn't plan to return from. The waves come crashing, threatening life as Harlow knows it. But then the storm ends. The sun returns, and Tommy returns, too, an unlikely rescue. This rescue changes everything between Harlow and the twins. Nothing stays secret long in this small town. 

Pros

• Ocean Love: This book is brimming with love for the sea. There are oceanographers and environmentalists with conflicting voices and conflicting plans. Crashing waves and jetties, gentle marine ecology and dangerous swells: all sides of seaside life make the page. This book encompasses the push and pull of marine life: sea walls, piping plovers, salt spray, and stormy days. 

• Enlightening Perspectives: There are a lot of potential pitfalls for a writer tackling multiple POVs in their work, especially if those points-of-view repeat the same scene all over again. After all, it can be dull for a reader to read the same scene twice from slightly shifted perspectives. But Cassandra Hartt manages the shifting POVs here really well. Though scenes are repeated, the viewpoints are so drastically different in terms of frame of mind, agenda, and narrative voice that it's not merely a repeat to read over again. The repetition is instead an eye-opening, enlightening new perspective on what has already been read. 

• Lyrical: Hartt's writing is beautiful. This book is very character-driven, and the writing does an excellent job of expressing the various states of the human mind. It is haunting, sad and echoing--lost and wallowing. Depression sweeps through the early pages of this book like waves. It comes and goes. The word usage is undoubtedly lyrical--but the content, especially early on, is most definitely in need of a trigger warning. It is beautiful but also chilling--not for the feint of heart. 

Cons

• Ethereal: I don't usually mean this as a critique. I love things that are ethereal, especially lyrical writing that can be so described. Here, however, this ethereal quality not really what I wanted. "Ethereal" might not be quite the right word, exactly, for my critique, but it's the best I could come up with. Basically, I felt like the whole narrative was kind of floating, swimming on a sea of lyrical prose but not ultimately grounded. It was rather wishy-washy, like the waves that are essential to it. The narrative came in and out without purpose, root, cause--it just felt too surreal for me as a reader. It didn't feel purposeful enough. 

• Toxicity: It wasn't quite clear how intentional the interpersonal toxicity in this book was, but intentional or not, it needed to be addressed. And it wasn't addressed to the extent that it should have been. The relationships are incredibly toxic. Harlow is incredibly toxic, the kind of character who perhaps needs a redemption arc. And the only character who got a redemption arc was Tommy. Everyone else stayed lost in their toxic ways. 

• Tackles Too Much: This book falls firmly into the "literary fiction" category, something rather rare in the YA market. Literary fiction can be really good when done well, but sometimes, the author of a literary piece (or literary wannabe, at least) tries too hard to reach that benchmark. In my experience as a reader, a bookseller, and someone who attended a university that specialized in producing "literary" writers, someone who aims for literary fiction will end up with a book like this: a book swamped in poignant threads that could have been great if they hadn't been lost in the ultimate sea of jumbled ideas. There's too much happening in this book. There isn't enough focus in the end. What could have been poignant gets lost in the myriad tangled threads. 

Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

6/10

Fans of Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock's Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town will sink right into this small-town-big-problems world. Those who enjoyed the lyrical storytelling of Julie Carrick Dalton's Waiting for the Night Song will love the beautiful word usage in this book as well. 

Details

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Date: June 8, 2021
Series: N/A
Buy It HERE

Note: I was provided with an ARC by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.