Well, this one is strange. I love the premise, and the writing is excellent, but it turns out that the book is mediocre to the point that I only rate it three stars out of five. Our Wives Under the Sea is only 223 pages long, but it still took a concentrated push to get me through the last 50 pages or so.
The premise: A marine biologist leaves on what should be a routine expedition only to find herself and two crew members trapped for five months on the ocean floor in a malfunctioning submarine. When she is finally able to return to her wife, it quickly becomes apparent that the scientist is suffering from a severe case of PTS. But it's when the physical changes start to take place, that her wife reluctantly starts looking for real answers - answers that will frustrate and terrify her.
Great hook, right?
And the writing is just excellent, right from this opening sentence:
The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.
This perfectly places the reader in the setting, and is spookily intriguing enough to get them to keep reading.
So why then did I find it to be an overall mediocre novel? It may be because of my personal quirk about never feeling quite satisfied by open-ended novels, the kind that leave you screaming for answers and explanations even after you've turned the final page. That's the way I felt after turning page 223 of Our Wives Under the Sea. Julia Armfield, however, is such a good writer that I'm going to try to find her first novel in hopes that it didn't end quite as foggily as this one did.
This, I think, is the British cover (Armfield is English), and I much prefer it to the US cover:
