DNFed at 30%.

This book just might not be for me. I loved the setting and the world building involved, but the characters kind of fell flat for me. I'm so happy that books tackle heavier subjects, which this book definitely does. However, one of the problems I had is that, outside of her trauma, Effy just didn't feel like a fleshed out character and then almost every other character in the book is a terrible human. Her roommate and her roommate's partner are the only ones who weren't immediately horrible. The love interest wasn't horrible, but they did have a enemies thing going on when they met. Maybe this gets explained later, but at where I am in the story, it was just too much.

Overall I have pretty mixed feelings on this book. Although I would consider it a good example of a well-done dark academia novel, it sometimes felt like the author was purposely letting the characters not see things for the sake of making the novel last longer than it would have otherwise. The worldbuilding was also a strange combination of exposition and just hoping you figure it out, which made the very beginning both boring and confusing– I wasn’t sure how much of a fantasy the novel was meant to be, which I guess could have also been representative of how the character saw reality, but it just didn’t work for me in particular.
However, the book really improved for me after the first part and I started to understand the world a bit better, and the characters were all well-fleshed out, and the way that the backstory of Effy was revealed, along with her motivations, was done perfectly. Also Ava Reid had the very difficult job of getting me to consider a white boy named Preston (seriously, that’s a horrible name for a literature scholar-type characters, he sounds like he owns boat shoes and goes to frat parties) a good love interest, and it worked, so that’s definitely something in the book’s favor.

So moody! I loved every bit of this. It gave me major Crimson Peak vibes and I was eating it up. Fairly quick read full of Lore, storms, faeries, ghosts, and so much more. This would be a perfect Autumn read. Ava Reid has a really lovely storytelling ability. Her books have a really nice balance of dark and light + fairytale vibes.
I wish some things were a little less predictable but overall it was a great read and a couple of the twists did take me by surprise!

I am all aboard the dark academia subgenre train and A Study in Drowning is one of the latest additions. I found this book a little difficult to rate. There were parts that I loved, the academic worldbuilding and Reid’s gothic atmospheric prose, and then there were parts that I disliked, the characters or found somewhat lacking, the rest of the worldbuilding.

A Study in Drowning, like the best of dark academia, follows our main character Effy’s obsessive study into the the Angharad, a literary epic written by a recently deceased national treasure. As she travels to the author’s ancestral home, ostensibly for architectural design reasons, but really to seek a closeness, a kinship to the Angharad, she finds herself embroiled in a web of secrets surrounding the book’s origins and the author’s history.

It’s clear that Reid has familiarity with scholarship around literature, because the academic world she builds up, in epigraphs and character discussions and in-text references surrounding the Angharad is incredibly comprehensive. We see the full scope of the history of this epic, in the way this text was regarded by both scholars and the average reader alike over time, the various interpretations of the text itself, and scholarly understanding of the demographics reading this book. The discussions around this book and how it relates to gender and culture of its larger world is delightfully nuanced, and perhaps one of my favorite parts of this book.

The rest of the worldbuilding, however, felt somewhat lacking. There was just enough to somewhat flesh out the scope of the story itself, but I felt like much was left untouched. There are vague notions of Effy’s country and its neighboring country at war, but the details aren’t mentioned beyond vague hints. Effy speaks of this war as a fight against this other invading country’s colonialist attempts to wipe out her own culture, but so little is actually described about the situation that it personally read more like two neighboring countries who’ve historically been in petty disputes driving up nationalist rhetoric to encourage the war effort, something Effy’s fully bought into. On an entirely personal level, from the tone of the writing and the overall atmosphere, this world doesn’t feel like it should have cars or telephones and it did, and that just felt off for me,

Reid’s prose, however, is a thing of beauty. Effy spends much of her time in the south, in an old, dilapated house at the cliff of a mountain against the ocean, one slowly falling apart from salt and rot. Reid somehow manages to mirror this oceanic rot and decay into the writing itself, painting beautiful Gothic imagery of Effy’s surroundings. The story itself, and the themes of academic abuse survivorship, intertwine perfectly with the tone that Reid sets.

My two main detractions from this book were the ending and Effy herself. A Study in Drowning has about an 80k wordcount and I really wish there were another 20k. The ending and the ‘final epiphany’ felt rushed and a little too sudden. I wish there had been a little more buildup and foreshadowing. Meanwhile, I found Effy herself a somewhat difficult character to follow. There’s clearly some intentional discomfort of being in Effy’s head as a sexual assault victim and the severe misogyny of this world, but even beyond that, I just found her to be a somewhat unpleasant character. Still the mysteries of the Angharad were excellent and I never lost immersion.

Overall, I rate this book a 4/5. While I had my dislikes, it hit all my favorite aspects of the dark academia genre. The academic worldbuilding, prose, and atmosphere were all top notch, and while I didn’t love the characters, I was sucked into the secrets they were uncovering.

A Study in Drowning is a moody, slow-burn mystical realism book about fairytales and idols, and what happens when reality is oh so different than you were led to believe. Effy believes in fairy tales, she has been seeing the Fairy King her entire life-so it makes sense that her favorite book is an epic about a girl who falls in love with the Fairy King, and what happens afterwards. But when she is invited to compete to design her idols house it seems like an impossible task, especially with Preston Heloury there hellbent on proving the author a fraud. As this unlikely duo works together to piece together clues as to the mysterious author's history, what they will find will change everything.

I really enjoyed the mood that this book inspired in me. It was lightly dark, mysterious and just the right amount of moody. There were a lot of moments that made me so angry and distinctly uncomfortable, without being too graphic. The author superbly wrote about anxiety. There were a lot of hard topics that she didn't shy away from. I really liked the basis of the story, even if I found the ending rather anticlimatic.

This is a slow moving book, so if you like things to be succinct and fast-paced this may not be for you. Check the content warnings if you know you have subjects that trigger you!

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It isn't a new favorite, but I'm happy to have been able to listen to it. The narrator does a wonderful job matching the moodiness of the story. YA fantasy lovers should definitely check this one out!

Really enjoyed this book, and I'm so thankful to the publisher and NetGalley for a digital ARC for review. Definitely recommend this when it comes out in September.

The main character is Effy, who wants to study literature but is unable to do so because the literature program does not accept women. So instead she enters the architecture program, even though she doesn't have any talent or skill in that direction. But it at least gets her a higher education. As the only woman in that program, she's dealt with a lot. So when she sees a notice about a competition to design a house for the widow and son of her absolute favorite writer, Emrys Myrddin, she jumps at the opportunity. And she wins the competition and goes off to visit the location and finish out her design.

Enter Preston, a literature student studying Emrys Myrddin, who has died six months prior. He's been sent by his professor to research and find primary documents (letters, journals, etc) from the estate for their academic work.

Effy discovers that things are not at all what she expected, including Preston, and the two of them must work together to figure out what is going on.

Partly dark academia (vibes), a bit rivals to lovers, and lots of creepy vibes and involvement with myths and stories.

There is a big mystery that the two characters are trying to solve, and although the answer doesn't come to them until late in the story, the reader figures it out pretty quickly. And that might seem like a problem with the book--that the answer seems so obvious that it is annoying that the characters can't figure it out. But I'd argue that the mystery being "easy" to solve is part of the point.

First, this book is not a mystery, so the solution is not the point of the book. Really it's a lot about "truth" and women being believed and mental health when it's not taken seriously. So the focus is on the theme, not the mystery. And the fact that the answer is "easy" for the reader but extremely difficult for the characters to realize further emphasizes the point about truth and women's stories. It's quite masterfully done, I think.

Other themes:
"Survival is bravery" -- there's not just one way to be brave
"drowning" -- the book really delves into many different meanings and ways of looking at what it means to be drowing

Thank you to NetGalley, Ava, HarperCollins, and everyone else involved in allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book. Truly, I am grateful.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 for me!

My thoughts:

This is a hauntingly beautiful tale, told with all the trappings of a fairytale, wrapped in the deep mists of gothic romance, and a more modern dark academia aesthetic. Mystery, fantasy, and horror themes come through in a beautifully woven plot. The sea brine creeps in on you like rust and mildew... The atmosphere Ava creates is dense and immersive, giving the reader a real sense of this world.

This book made me cry many different kinds of tears. I am preordering a physical copy asap.

This book explores themes of power, loss of control, voice, escapism, facing hatred and scorn, trauma, and finding strength in survivorship. Where does reality end and fantasy begin, and what does your definition of those things do to change you?

This book is heart-rending and deeply romantic. I loved this. One of the best books I've read this year. I might need to unpack some trauma with a therapist after this book.

Ava delivers another amazing story, and in this last year has become one of my favorite authors.

This is such an amazing fantasy with dark academia and gothic paranormal thriller vibes! The setting in a crumbling house on the edge of a soon-to-be-drowned landscape was the perfect background for this stunning and melancholic read! The setting puts you on edge as the main characters worked through the mystery and reluctantly began working together. I also loved the feminist themes and how clever Effy is throughout the book. This is the first book I have picked up by Ava Reid, and I will have to pick up her other books soon! Her writing style is gorgeous, and I really enjoyed this book!

Thank you to Netgalley and HarperTeen for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!

3.5⭐️

Content warning: Sexual Assault, Bullying, Sexism, Classism, Child Abandonment, Gun Violence. (Also a child treated as mentally I’ll when they aren’t)

A Study in Drowning is the YA Fantasy child of Emily Wildes Encyclopedia of Faeries and Divine Rivals. This novel is a stand-alone and is 3rd person pov. It takes place in a fictional world similar to the 1930-50s time period.

I really did have a fun time reading this and didn’t want to put it down towards the end, but I also had some problems with it. The synopsis sounded like way too much going on, but I actually think it was all tied together nicely in the end.

Writing Style: I’ll be honest, the first 50 pages was painful to get through and I don’t know why it felt so different from the rest of the novel. In the first fifty pages, the writing style is choppy, it’s telling and not showing, and I couldn’t figure out the setting. But I didn’t have any of those problems in the rest of the novel.

Characters: Effy’s prejudice to Argantians was incredibly annoying and I didn’t like the way it was handled. (For background, Argantian is the neighboring country that is at war with Effy’s country, and it’s where the LI is from). Effy said just absolutely disgusting things to the LI, barely apologized, and never really checked her prejudice as a whole. It was more of a “oh I met this one Argantian who isn’t that bad, oops” but her thoughts towards the nation as a whole are never held accountable.

Romance: I also felt that their relationship could’ve been developed more, or that the pacing could’ve been better. This was described as rivals to lovers but the rival part is very one sided and is just rooted in Effy’s prejudice. This story is also not romance focused.

Plot: As for the plot, it was fun to read and I wasn’t sure till the end if it was going to be happy or sad or a cliffhanger, but I did have the plot twist figured out at 60% so I wish it had been a little bit more held back from the reader.

As far as diversity/ rep goes, I believe everyone in this novel was white? There wasn’t anything that led me to believe otherwise, unless I missed some description. There is one sapphic side couple, that gets maybe three pages of time.

Overall, despite the issues, I still enjoyed this book and the gothic setting was definitely there. I was reading this with the light on because something about the depiction of the Fairy King really got to me.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperTeen for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

First this book is stunning. It was my most anticipated of the year and it did not let me down. There are so many beautiful quotes, moments, and sentiments in this book and I loved every minute of it. While I did guess one of the ultimate reveals, instead of being annoyed I felt vindicated.

I am not 100% sold on this being a YA book (and I believe it's actually being published as adult in the UK which makes more sense) but I can see teens enjoying this one - and I think that there are some really good lessons and takeaways for teen girls specifically.

A Study in Drowning, the stunning young adult debut by Ava Reid, plunges you into a dark academia fantasy where a reader's obsession with her beloved author leads her to uncover the truth behind his work and how that relates to her own past, present and the nightmares she has of the monster in her favorite book.

Genuinely, the prose in this is stunning and I really loved Reid’s character work, parallelism and the lore she created for the novel.

My one wish is perhaps that there would have been a map at the front just because I wanted to be able to visualize how far people were traveling but since I got a digital advanced reader copy it’s possible that will be included in the final publication!

Easy 5/5 stars!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publishers for this ARC! So sorry it took so long to give a review, I wrote a review but I guess it didn't submit properly.

This book is stunning and the first book I have ever read by Ava Reid and I am blown away. Her writing was beautiful and I kept wanting to keep turning the page of this book. This book is a must read for everyone and one of my favorites of 2023 and I am so excited for this book to come out because once it does I am going to get a physical copy of the book.

I absolutely loved this book and the internal lore that Reid laid out. The Faerie King as an underlying plot point interwoven with the secret origins of Myrddin's work was a brilliant storyline. Effy and Preston racing to find the secrets of Myrddin's house and their eventual discovery of the affair that led to his greatest work kept me reading well into the night. I couldn't wait to find out what happened!

Ava Reid’s fantastic YA debut centers on institutional sexism (and really sexism in general) in such a fantastic way that it had me questioning if the narrator was unrealizable during the first half of the book - which I do feel guilty about.

I found the pacing in this story to be quicker than other Reid books and I was interested and engaged through the entire book. This standalone follows an aspiring literature student, Effy, who is relegated to studies in architecture because of her gender. As an architecture student she gets the opportunity to work for her favorite author’s family, but sometimes reality is difficult to ascertain and meeting your heroes can be disappointing.

This book is much lighter on horror than Reid’s other works, but I would still recommend checking trigger/content warnings, especially if you’re picking this up for teens.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the eARC; I am giving this review voluntarily.

Ava Reid's "A Study in Drowning" easily earns a perfect five-star rating and becomes an all-time favorite. Reid's skill in creating a tangible atmosphere allows readers to immerse themselves fully in Effy's emotions and fears. The book's captivating narrative continuously builds, leaving readers entranced and unable to put it down. It beautifully portrays the struggles of women who face disbelief and loneliness but eventually find the strength to stand up for themselves. Personally, the book resonates deeply, reflecting the transformative power of literature in one's life. The author's analogy of writing the book as shining a beacon from a lighthouse, hoping for a response from the distant ships, evokes a sense of longing and anticipation.

A story with gothic vibes, old welsh folklore, and dark academic rivals to lovers. This book was amazing. It’s whimsical, atmospheric, and has well developed plot and characters. I loved that there was mental health awareness included, and that we got to see Effys struggle with dealing with the misogyny during that time. I really enjoyed this story and recommended it to anyone who loves fairytales, and fantasy.

I had only meant to start this book and read a few chapters. Once I began though, it was impossible to put down. I read the whole thing in one sitting while my toddler wreaked absolute havoc on my house. I wish I was exaggerating.

I don't have a single criticism. This book is my exact cup of tea. Chef's kiss.

I would recommend this to anyone who liked Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries, specifically. I love the academic take on Fae stories, leaning more heavily into folklore. I enjoyed the bit of mystery. There is a romantic subplot but it doesn't detract from the plot, only compliments it. As a woman, I identified heavily with the themes and rooted for our protagonist and her growth throughout the story. This author has such a talent for setting tone and creating an intricate story that isn't convoluted.

I can't wait for this to come out so I can purchase a copy to display on my shelf of favorites!

A Study in Drowning is, at it's heart, about the struggle between the power of story, and the power of truth. It has the gothic vibe and suspension of reality found in The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, but in a Welsh-inspired-dark-academia setting. It examines in the contradictions of being a woman in a man's world, and wrestles with how someone's background shapes their worldview.

I'm continuously amazed with Ava's power to make such a lovely yet uncomfortable story, and this was no exception. I loved Effy's character. Her search for her identity, her all encompassing battle with her mental health, and her constant struggles with navigating the world as a young woman had me nodding my head in affirmation throughout the story. I enjoyed the fact that though there was romance, the overarching story remains firmly in Effy's grasp. Preston's gentle yet fervent support never overtakes Effy's will or sense of agency, he's simply a pillar of support whenever Effy needs one.

I also really enjoyed the dive into Welsh folklore. The incorporation of the old folk tale motifs of wicked and cruel fairies, three challenges, and warding with iron or ash added to the creeping atmosphere of the story without pulling the story completely from reality.

I would suggest this to anyone looking for an upper YA dark academia book, and will absolutely recommend it to friends.

A huge thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Children's Books for "A Study in Drowning" by Ava Reid.

Set in a world where patriarchal rule is still prevalent, and women are seen as the weaker sex meant to be subdued. A world that provides power and corrupt hosts for the Fairy King.

Initially a slow start while being introduced to Effy Sayre, her rival Preston Héloury, and the tales of the Fairy King they have both devoured... but quickly we are dragged into the unknown, and a quest to uncover the truth of 'Angharad'.

The perfect mix of a Gothic mystery, and the truth in fairytales.

4/5

I'm not even sure how to begin describing this story. The dread that I felt throughout this entire novel was worth it; The sadness and hurt of billions of women is soothed by the ending. This is set in an alternate universe, but the lingering misogyny that persists in academia gives the backdrop. The setting transforms from a dusty old university both prestigious and somehow in extremely ill repair, to a crumbling, persistently damp, mansion that the sea seizes in little pieces every day.

Effy is such a wonderful character. So many books have described the empowered women who can take charge of their lives, just by instinct, but Effy is solidly in the often forgotten "freeze" response. Her character arc is beautiful and it's so wonderful to see a story about a young woman finding her voice.

The love interest is a total sweetheart. Some are billing this as an enemies to lovers, but I'd say it's solidly in the academic rivals to lovers territory. He's the kind of understanding and thoughtful man that women want for themselves and for their sisters and best friends. My best comparison is Lloyd from Say Anything, but if Lloyd had a bit more ambition and bit less interest in kickboxing.

Reid's descriptions of literally anything are wonderful. She strings words together in a way that I don't think I could emulate if I had a thousand years to practice. One particularly loathsome character is described (I'm paraphrasing) as looking like "if someone put a jacket and hat on a rotting pumpkin."

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5712046004