I really don’t like to give books 1 star, especially ARCs, but I don’t feel like I can give it more.

There were quite a few things that never clicked for me:
- the dialogue felt unrealistic, and repetitive, and I never knew the motivations of any of the characters. There were a lot of “!” and time jumps that didn’t make any sense to me.
- The book description was about Mt. Saint Helens but they don’t go there until 70% into the book
- It was both too much and too little about geology. So much time was spent on her affair and random geological adventures with way too much description that the actual explosion felt anticlimactic.
- Lastly - content warnings please!! There was so much SA content in this that definitely needed some forewarning.

The writing really didn’t work for me and I had to force myself to stay interested. I think that the entire Don storyline could probably have been cut to be honest. Or even the entire first half of the book. It just felt long and repetitive, and with my other narrative issues that made it very difficult to get through.

“Rocks were history books of the earth. They told of volcanoes erupting, seas coming and going, continents moving and mountains forming…One only had to know the language to read them…”.

“There aren't many places like the Grand Canyon, where millions of years of earth’s history is exposed. Archaeologists work in the time scale of humans, but geologists work in deep time.”

With college behind them, Lauren Brown and her husband Kenny booked a river rafting expedition down the Colorado River. Lauren admired the magnificence of the Grand Canyon…the striated layers of rock in the canyons represented mysterious eras of the past. Once she determined that geological studies was her true calling, a male dominated field in the 1970s, she and Kenny seemed to drift apart.

As Lauren's marriage was faltering, she sought comfort in the wrong place, in the company of her thesis advisor. He proved to be vindictive, discounting her fieldwork and controlling her ability to complete her thesis since she resisted his insistent, predatory behavior. He was a thorn in the side of Lauren's best friend and fellow researcher, Chris Connor at Tex Polytechnic College in Pasadena, Texas. The three men in Lauren’s orbit consisted of an intermittent, emotionally distant husband, a vindictive advisor in control of Lauren’s geological progress and a true, compassionate friend, one she could spur with to gain perspective on her work. These challenges would forestall but not diminish Lauren’s joy for her fieldwork in geology. “Exposed rock was ripe for study. It was exciting to think of the antiquity of the earth and its millions of years of history waiting for geologists to explore.”

Lauren Brown continued to pursue graduate work in volcanology. Research cruises included destinations to study underwater volcanoes and mountains of basaltic lava.The Earth’s subterranean movements would be evaluated and rock samples might provide data to bolster understanding of why tectonic plates “converge, diverge, or slide by each other thus causing quakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.”

In “Deep Time” novelist Susan Sizer Bogue provides detailed, well researched information on the study of volcanology and the mapping of basalts. Despite observation of the trends of prior volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens, those camping just outside the Red Zone were ill prepared for the fast moving, catastrophic lateral eruption. This fascinating geological journey follows the imagined fieldwork of Lauren Brown as she analyzes rock samples from summertime geological expeditions, conducts research into Columbia River basalt flows in Oregon and observes harmonic tremors (continuous rhythmic ground shaking that might mean magma is moving under the volcano…) near Mount St. Helens. A fascinating read.

Thank you Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, for She Writes Press for a print ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

This is my first time giving an ARC copy a poor review and I don’t feel good about it, but this book was simply, not good.

I’ll be specific I promise. And I did read the whole thing.

The writing is stilted and unnatural. The dialogue felt very juvenile and unrealistic.

The author sets the book in this beautiful landscapes and then does almost nothing with them for the first half of the book.

I just, the sentence level writing is not great. I’m sorry. It felt like I was reading something written by a high schooler or even younger. The mother plotline comes in out of no where and doesn’t really go anywhere, the main character has no backbone and is constantly obsessing over the men in her life. The plot bounced around like crazy and not in a good way.

Ok I’ll stop. Genuinely sorry but I cannot recommend this book at all.