"Winter Tide" by Ruthanna Emrys is a captivating and thought-provoking novel that reimagines the universe of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos from a fresh perspective. The book follows the story of Aphra Marsh, a member of the Innsmouth community who survived the government's purge of her people. Aphra is recruited by a government agent to help thwart a Nazi plot that threatens the world.

Emrys' writing is poetic and immersive, with a remarkable sense of character and a vividly imagined world. The themes of identity, belonging, and the power of myth are explored with nuance and complexity, adding depth and richness to the story.

Overall, "Winter Tide" is a remarkable novel that deftly balances horror, mystery, and historical fiction. Highly recommended for fans of the Cthulhu Mythos and anyone looking for a fresh take on Lovecraftian horror.

I think anything Lovecraftian is just too cerebral for me. This was too dense for me to get the hang of or focus on anything. It's beautifully written, and I feel any fan of Lovecraft would be all over this, especially from a female author, giving a very different perspective than Lovecraft's own. It's just not for me.

There is a lot to like about this book, which has a wonderful sense of atmosphere and really commits to taking the ideas espoused by H P Lovecraft and building upon them in a truly substantive way. It tells the tale of Aphra Marsh, a former resident of Innsmouth who now resides in San Francisco and is working hard to reconnect with her family history and ancestral powers as a person of the deep. When the FBI suspect the Russians of attempting the body swapping methods of the Innsmouth inhabitants, he enlists Aphra to try to discover the culprits. While the basic plot reads like a mystery or thriller, this is far more of a slow burning exploration into family and the meaning of intimacy. Consequently, there were passages that I found a little confusing, both in terms of content as the magics discussed can get quite convoluted, but also in terms of location within the narrative. I did find the overall narrative a little disjointed at times, which was a shame because when the prose was compelling, it was really compelling. I really like some of the characters introduced here and think that there is real potential to tell more stories within this story world but overall, I just found this to be a little too uneven.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This tale of Innsmouth folk is deeply atmospheric, but it's the astringent first-person narrative voice of Aphra Marsh--Innsmouth native, internment camp survivor, magical scholar--that makes this book so wonderful. A fully fleshed out story in a fully drawn world, Emrys' tale embraces what Lovecraft reviled, making this a wonderful updated addition to Lovecraftiana. Also, it takes place largely at Miskatonic U. Thoroughly steeped in the atmosphere of H.P. but with much tighter prose. I can't wait for the sequel.

Intereting, but not sure I'll finish the series. I'm not that vested.

Winter Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy) by Ruthanna Emrys is just out, and so excellent. I received a galley and thought, “I don’t like Lovecraft, so I probably won’t read this.” But then I opened it up and the first paragraph seized me with the narrator’s voice and with curiosity, and then I read more and discovered the whole creepy racist Lovecraft mythos had been flipped and made rich and realistic. There are lots of female characters, all rebellious in their way and using different strategies to be themselves in the world. It’s set in 1949; several characters spent time in WWII internment camps, both a couple of siblings from a human subspecies and the Japanese family that eventually adopted them when they were the only survivors of their town. Another awesome thing about this book is that books are a huge part of it, books and libraries and archives, and who has access to them, and who controls that access, and what they mean to individuals and to peoples and to history as a whole. So, yeah, I’d recommend this book, very highly.

What a fantastic read! Being a fan of the Lovecraft mythos, I really enjoyed reading about the Innsmouth people through the lens of World War 1 and their attempts to recover their legacy and preserve their heritage. While the story can be a little slow at times, the characters are memorable and strong, and the story is solid.

Winter Tide was a revelation for me. I requested it based on the evocative cover and I wasn't disappointed. I loved it. Even more, months later I am still thinking about the Deep Ones and Aphra and Caleb's story and back-story.

I haven't read any of H P Lovecraft's work but Ruthanna Emrys' re-creation of Innsmouth community and legacy is evocative. I loved that the mystical elements are interwoven with historic events- the Japanese internment and the Cold War, and echoes of the Holocaust. The settings came to life - San Francisco, Miskatoic University and their visits to Innsmouth.

Aphra's intense loyalty to her birth family, her adopted family and the family she gathers around her at Miskatonic makes for compelling. reading. HIghly recommended. Cant wait for Innsmouth Legacy #2.

Based on the Lovecraftian Mythos, Winter Tide continues the story of Aphra Marsh, whom we met in the story The Litany of Earth, published by Tor.com, available at http://www.tor.com/2017/04/24/innsmouth-legacy-the-litany-of-earth/
It's a slow, rich read, very character driven. Not much happens until close to the end of the book, but I really didn't care, I was invested in the characters.

I've known for a long time that I prefer narratives inspired by Lovecraft to the original work; this is no exception. I loved being back with Aphra, and the writing was good enough to make this four stars for me, but I have to warn any potential readers that this is basically all character development and no plot. Story does <i>kind of</i> happen..? but it takes a back seat to a thorough exploration of the world Emrys has built inside the Chthulu mythos (and even so the action quite often metaphysical; geographically the characters are pretty static). This sounds like criticism when it isn't, really - I enjoyed every page, was content to sit and watch the characters do stuff because it was all interesting, it was just isn't action-packed. Strongly recommended for all mythos nerds.

I had to read this twice to make a coherent thought about it. The premise is just stunning. There are two survivors of a genocide against the Deep Ones, and they must work with the very government that killed their people to protect everyone from their own magic being used for evil. This is just amazing! The Cthulu mythos in the hands of Ruthanna Emyrs is profound. This is Lovecraft with all the heart and soul it is capable of having. The only thing I wish is that the next books were already available.

Ruthanna Emrys takes Lovecraft's legacy into the lives, blood, and fears of the people of Innsmouth. It's skillfully set in aftermath of WW II, amidst the fears of communist infiltrators, Nazi ritualism, and the aftermath of the Japanese concentration camps. Aphra Marsh is a heroine who is easy to connect to. She's lost most of her family on land, but gained a new one in the Japanese family who "adopted" her while they were all held prisoner in the camps. Now, the US Government wants Aphra to help them find a Russian spy who may have stolen secrets from Miskatonic University. Aphra and her brother agree to help, but their true motive is to recover the volumes of family and racial history that was stolen from the people of Innsmouth. Winter Tide delves deep into the history and the half-human "people of the water," the mysterious Yith, and the ever-present risk for those who won't heed what history teaches.

In Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys (Amazon | B&N | Kobo) we learn that Earth has a rich species history:

This is the litany of the people of Earth. Before the first, there was blackness, and there was fire. The Earth cooled and life arose, struggling against the unremembering emptiness. First were the five-winged eldermost of Earth, faces of the Yith . . . sixth are humans, the wildest of races, who share the world in three parts. The people of the rock, the K’n-yan, build first and most beautifully, but grow cruel and frightened and become the Mad Ones Under the Earth. The people of the air spread far and breed freely, and build the foundation for those who will supplant them. The people of the water are born in shadow on land, but what they build beneath the wave will live in glory till the dying sun burns away their last shelter.

Aphra Marsh is part of “the people of the water.” Her folk have been hunted and all but obliterated by the people of the air but she has found friends and family in San Francisco who overlook her peculiarity and support her. Most especially Charlie Dav, book store owner and a student of the occult. Together Charlie and Aphra are attempting to rework the ancient magics of her people. But what will they find along the way?

Trouble! An unusual story with love of family and friends woven throughout it this book examines what it means to be human in a world where people are persecuted for being the least bit different. From the Japanese internment camps of WWII to the hunt for alien others in the following years, this story is an emotional look at how it feels to be a stranger in your own land.

For those of you who don’t recognise the references, Winter Tide is set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft, the famous horror and dark fantasy short story writer and novelist. Though he died unknown and poverty-stricken, Lovecraft is popularly regarded as the father of dark fantasy due to his vivid and disturbing world where creatures from another dimension inimical to humans are on the verge of breaking through to our world. Emrys manages to give us an insight in the life of one of the two survivors of the Government attack on Innsmouth in 1928, which is reported and written about in Lovecraft’s writing.

I fell in love with this spare, gripping tale within a couple of pages – the character and premise immediately pulled me into the story where a paranoid and jittery US Government are seeing threats from anyone who looks different, back in 1949. Of course, part of the power of this story is that that febrile fearstoked political atmosphere so well depicted in this thriller also uncomfortably reflects the same mindset pervading mainstream thinking now in the 21st century.

Aphra is a marvellous character and the first person viewpoint (I) gives the reader a ringside seat into her sense of isolation, her anger at the loss of all her family with the exception of her brother and her constant, prickling feeling of danger whenever in a new situation, given her odd appearance. This could have so easily descended into a bleak trudge – but her spiky determination not to be overwhelmed by her grim circumstances gives us a clue as to why she survived while so many others died.

The story, without any apparent headlong rush, nonetheless steadily unspools, gathering momentum as this odd, compulsive world continues to beguile. The parent race, the Yith, are also represented and there are some welcome shafts of humour in amongst the turmoil and danger. I read way longer than I should have done to find out what happens next and climactic scene on the beach when Aphra meets her grandfather fully displays Emrys’s impressive talent. When I finally finished, I was dazed and excited in equal measure. And I cannot stop thinking about this one… In short, another outstanding read that has me humming with pleasure and excitement. Ruthanna Emrys. Remember the name – she is a talent to be reckoned with and this is a series that shouldn’t be missed by science fiction and fantasy fans.

While I obtained the arc of Winter Tide from the publisher via NetGalley, this has in no way influenced my unbiased review.
10/10

This was a novel that I was very excited to read. But there were 2 things I was unaware of when I first requested this book: 1) it's based on Lovecraft's work, and 2) there was a novella that serves as a prequel to this novel. My ignorance on these things hindered my ability to understand and enjoy this novel, resulting in me giving up on this book after about 5 or 6 chapters. I found myself confused by what was happening and the constant jumps in time. The familiarity on certain topics and concepts took me off guard and the explanations weren't very handy right away.... and I really didn't want to keep reading in order to find out. I think what really stopped me from continuing to give this book a shot was the fact that it was very slow-paced; it took forever for the story to get going. Between that and my complete bewilderment on the topic, I lost interest and unfortunately did not finish this novel. I hate not completing a story, especially when I've received an ARC but I just couldn't find it in me to push through. Because I didn't finish, I'm not going to give a rating for this book. Instead, I urge fans of Lovecraft and those who have read the novella that is a companion to this story, to give this novel a chance. I am sure that the story would make way more sense and be a lot more interesting for someone who actually understands the references that are being made in this book!

Let me be honest, not only did I score an e-ARC but I’ve been looking forward to this book since The Litany of Earth. It’s rare for me to fall so in love with books that I want to both devour them in one go and savour them over a span of days like chocolate. So, with that in mind, I originally read this is one day but am now, thanks to the audiobook, slowly appreciating all the subtle nuances I might have missed.

Winter Tide is gorgeous. It’s the cosmology of Lovecraft without the nastiness (aka the racism, the bigotry and other ideas which sadly taint a stunning literary universe). Indeed, identity, culture and otherness, they’re all front and centre; Aphra isn’t a ‘Person of the Air’, she’s got the sea running in her blood and, after her transformation, will live in the Deep Once cities until the sun burns out. It’s not forever but it’s still billions of years. The language is so Lovecraftian but it’s a gentle kind of esoteric, it doesn’t put you off but instead makes you ponder words and their meaning. At the same time, she’s still recovering from her people’s incarceration and genocide in camps later reused for the internment of the Japanese. This leads her into the lives of the Koto family with her brother, Caleb, as her only remaining kin on land. Oh and it’s left her scarred, mentally, as such a traumatic experience is wont to do. It’s even more relevant, now, for example than I think even the author thought it would be.

The story does kick off from Litany, as well as some mentions to the short story (which you should so go and read. Now. I’ll wait.) but the Tor short is essentially a prologue to a much bigger arc. Searching after old magics and fears Russians are using body-switching as the next weapon in a magical cold war, Aphra, her government minder and Neko, her adopted Japanese sister, return to Innsmouth and Miskatonic University. Both are, of course, important locations in the world of Lovecraft and they are eerie in the extreme. It feels odd to be somewhere so familiar but so strange, a place where you can study folklore and other subjects which are literal fusions of magic with physical sciences.

Occasionally, I was thrown by the odd flashback (especially in audio where the demarcation between scenes is just absent). Along the way, Aphra encounters new friends and old family. It does feel a tad deus ex machina to encounter not only a Yith but also transformed members of Aphra’s own people, now living in the depths below Innsmouth. Yet the idea of her faith, Aeonism, being openly worshipped with its own temples and rituals, is gorgeous and transforms the book from a simple mystery with magical overtones to a true Lovecraft mythos novel, reimagined for a new era but enduring never the less.

Winter Tide, Book One of The Innsmouth Legacy, is available now in ebook, print and audio from all the usual places. You can also follow the author on Twitter and you totally should.

Aphra Marsh and her brother Caleb are the only survivors of the Innsmouth raid. The government either murdered or captured all of the people, wiping out the entire town in what looks to be almost an one night. Those that weren’t killed in the raid were placed in internment camps, the same camps that the Japanese were placed into later. There the survivors died off slowly, taken far from the ocean they call home. These Innsmouth people are not horrible twisted half demons but simply another subrace of humanity, the People of the Water. Once they reach the appropriate age they transform and return to the sea. By being kept in this desert camp those adults that survived long enough to transform are experimented on, left to die slow and dry deaths. Aphra and Caleb survive on what seems like luck. They are the last, the youngest. When the Japanese are moved into the camps there are only three of them, the siblings and one dying elder. They are takin in by an amazing family and when they are released Aphra and Caleb go with them. Since then Aphra has been living with her new family while Caleb travels around trying to recover something of their family. You can meet Aphra in a short on Tor.com – which I highly, highly recommend as it also introduces a few other characters – and see a tickle of what the actual novel is about. Aphra is now asked help the government that destroyed her people, demonized them and treated them poorly. The Russians are looming on the minds of Big Brother and they’re worried that something Aphra’s people studied could be being used by their enemies.

Now like I said above, I really think you should pick up Litany of Earth before picking up Winter Tide. You’ll be introduced to not just Aphra but Spector (the agent that approaches her), and Charlie. It will also give you a taste of what you’re in for here. The book isn’t light, at least it wasn’t for me. It took what it was about seriously and it did it very well. It’s dense (thus my hesitancy on recommending it widely) but engaging. Honestly I’ll be purchasing this for myself to reread and markup. Ruthanna Emrys does a wonder job of examining what we consider ‘a monster’. She uses Aphra, of course, but parallels her with not just Neko (her adopted sister from the camps) but Spector who is a Jewish man in the government. Later we get even more diversity and more examples. We also have a varied cast but one that’s heavy on the ladies and gives us amazingly unique ones. The women face the judgement of just being a woman, occasionally language is thrown about in reference to Neko and Dawson (another lady of color to pop into the narrative) that is accurate to the time but shut down so fast and expertly that I just wanted to cheer. I can’t convey exactly how the book affected me but the way she showed us what is ‘monster’ and what is ‘human’ (all three subraces considered there) is amazing.

The characters are strong as hell. Oddly enough the weakest for me was Aphra but that was less in the writing and more on how I connected. Aphra was cautious (with damn good reason). She’s a thinker, she ponders, she’s soft spoken at times, but she’s a leader in her own right. It was characters like Trumbull, the only female professor on the campus they’re investigating at who has secrets of her own, and Audrey that I loved. Even Neko, whose part is smaller but just as rich, stood out to me. Look – I’m going to be honest here. I’m SO bad at names. So bad that I’ll finish a review for a book I finished the night before and will still have to look up the character names. I do not have that problem here. This characters are so ingrained in my head I can’t get them out. Our male cast is just as strong. Caleb is angry, he meets the group to assist in the investigation and he has every right to be angry but he develops and learns alongside the rest. Spector is between a rock and hard place but acts believably and honestly. The only male character I wanted more of was Charlie, but he has a strong role in Litany of Earth. I can look at each character and give you a way they evolved and changed, for good or ill. And for someone like Trumbull that’s saying something. Characters are big for me, and a big cast doesn’t always work strongly. These do.

The story is the only part that has an obvious flaw, but it’ll only be that way for some readers. It’s dense and slow to start. If you want thrown into a mess early than you’re not going to like the first 40-50% of this. It’s a slow burn. I also took it slowly so that could be part of it. We get the basis of everything we need to attach and care about the characters and then we take a jump off the deep end and get into the action. But even then it doesn’t move too fast. It’s not a wildly different pacing, just a touch faster so that it seems consistent. The appropriate pay off to the slow build up. It’s also not going to be as wacky weird H.P. Lovecraft as you may expect. Remember, the book is taking apart the 'monster' construct. It reduces and gives us instead a beautiful religion and magic.

I've got to cut this short. I know I've been posting a lot of good reviews recently, I must be on a roll. This though was a stunner. It crept up on me. I finished it feeling good about it. Then the more I thought and thought the better I liked it. Like I said at the start, this isn't a light read but a read well worth your time. If the premise sounds appealing and you have some dedication to give - try this, please!

Final note. I want one of those salt cakes Aphra makes. They sound amazing.

I didn't realize Winter Tide was based on Cthulu mythology and the worlds of HP Lovecraft until I started reading it. The funny thing is that I've actually read some of Lovecraft's short stories on Cthulu, I just am not a die-hard fan so I've forgotten a lot of the details. I think I would have gotten a lot more out of this book if I were a bigger fan of Lovecraft. Even with my limited experience I got the sense that Ruthanna Emrys was paying homage to his universe while also dissecting and re-imagining it. I definitely appreciated the more feminist lens of Emrys over Lovecraft!

Winter Tide is sort of historical fiction, with some sci-fi thrown in. It weaves in elements of United States history with crazy science fiction elements; I thought bringing in Japanese internment was a genius idea. The main character and her brother are isolated and locked down for because people fear those who do not look like them. The pair finds comfort when Japanese Americans join them; together they bond over their "otherness". It's a simple idea but it makes so much sense!

A lot of Winter Tide is like that. There aren't any huge twists because you find out most of the secrets in the beginning. While there are many unexpected elements, they all weave into the story so well that you can really see how everything fits together and how it wouldn't make sense for it to be any other way. The characters and plot are both very deliberate.

My biggest complaint with this book is that it was hard for me to get emotionally invested in it. It's really hard to feel any emotional connection through Aphra's narration. Aphra's voice is a little dry, very introspective and a little bit...alien. She's not someone that you can easily see yourself as, and of course that's the point, but it still makes it hard to get through the story when Aphra is deconstructing and reflecting on everything with such reserve and detachment.

I would definitely recommend this book for people who love Lovecraft and aren't put-off by a more introspective and slow-moving science fiction story. This book is written in such a unique and lovely way, I will definitely look out for more by Emrys even if this one wasn't my cup of tea.

Winter Tide is the first book in Ruthanna Emrys’ budding series The Innsmouth Legacy, set in a world in which the facts of the Lovecraft mythos remain the same but the reading is crucially different. The book is preceded by Emrys’ 2014 novelette The Litany of Earth, which you can read for free on Tor.com.

The key to the book is its protagonist, Aphra Marsh. Aphra is a daughter of the men of the water, a sub-species of human the land-walking form of which had made their home, among other places, at Innsmouth, Massachusetts. This is the famous Innsmouth of H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos, depicted in the short story ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth‘.

In Lovecraft’s story, Obed Marsh is the patriarch and shipping magnate who brings the cult of Dagon to America, striking a deal with the Deep Ones, a humanoid fish-like, frog-like people who live under the sea, for plentiful fishing and gold in return for interbreeding and worship.

Seen through Aphra’s eyes, Lovecraft’s depiction of the people of Innsmouth as horrifying sub-humans dedicated to sinister rites becomes a wilfully ignorant outsider’s view, clearly parallel with European colonisers’ historical description of the native peoples of North America and Africa. (This is not really a subjective reading. H. P. Lovecraft was infamously hideously racist. It’s not coincidence that the Dagon cult came in the original from the Pacific islands.)

In Winter Tide, the people of the water are as old and legitimate a human sub-species as the people of the air (i.e. what we understand as vanilla humans), as well as the people of the earth, who long ago went mad and descended under the surface (for the Lovecraftian source for the people of the earth look at his short story ‘The Rats in the Walls‘, a genuinely horrifying tale marred by its abhorrent racism). Emrys’ Innsmouth has been home to people of the water since its inception. What Lovecraft cast as the result of interbreeding between humans and Deep Ones are in Winter Tide ordinary genetic features of the people of the water.

In ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ Lovecraft has the people of Innsmouth disappeared by the government to military prisons and concentration camps. Emrys shows us in more detail what happened to them: they were taken by the FBI to camps in the Nevada desert, where all but two survivors died.

The story of Winter Tide takes place two decades after the raid on Innsmouth. Aphra has been living in San Francisco with the Kotos, a Japanese-American family she met in the camps, and working at bookshop whose owner, Charlie Day, she has been tentatively teaching magic. FBI agent Ron Spector, her history with whom is covered in The Litany of Earth, has a job for her: accompany him back across the country to Miskatonic University to help uncover a Russian spy who may have discovered the magical technique of body-swapping.

Along the way, Aphra reunites with her brother and her underwater family, and broadens her narrow circle of friends and allies, as well as running into further ignorance and malice.

Winter Tide is a story in dialogue with ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. It takes the short story’s tropes and twists them to reveal Lovecraft’s unpleasant psyche, and uses them to demonstrate the ugly truth: that his racist revulsion at the ‘other’ is no less than the first step in the journey to concentration camps and the extermination of a people.

But more than that, the plot itself is an answer to the murderous bigotry of its background. Following the genocide of the land-walking people of the water, Aphra and Caleb find their own healing in an America that fears and dismisses them, as well as a further family through their magic, members variously marginalised in differing ways. It’s her family, both new and old, that helps Aphra navigate the dangers of the elite Miskatonic University and the FBI investigation, and emerge if not unscathed at least stronger and less afraid than before.

This is why, even though I initially felt wrong-footed because I hadn’t first read The Litany of Earth, Winter Tide quickly became comfort reading for me. It was not only this but also the care and respect with which it was written. In a book about a genocide, that care is important.

Given this, the weight given to the library at Miskatonic and its collection of books from Innsmouth really hit me in the feels. Books and knowledge are important to the people of the water, and the sequestering of Aphra’s community’s books by Miskatonic in the name of preservation parallels the reluctance of private art collectors to relinquish Jewish-owned art objects following WWII.

To bring up another fantasy diaspora, Tolkien’s depiction of the dwarves of Erebor as prone to ‘obsession’ with their gold is a textbook example of a too-simplistic presentation of a homeless people’s desire to reclaim their lost artefacts. Contrast this with Emrys’ sensitivity: showing the pain of seeing your own precious things in someone else’s possession, knowing they are all that’s left of your people and that they rightfully belong to you, yet also knowing it would be irresponsible to liberate them.

While I would recommend reading The Litany of Earth before Winter Tide, you should definitely do so and get in on this ASAP. Personally I can’t wait to get back into Emrys’ alternate America and back into Aphra’s head in further books in this series.

I started this post a couple of days ago with a bit about how I really don't like to review books I don't finish, especially review copies from Netgalley, because it feels unfair. I mean, yeah, I'm not finishing because I don't like the book that much, but it seems wrong to judge based on less than the whole thing.

But then I finished the book. So...I liked it more than I thought? Or at least, I found its weaknesses more interesting? Anyway, I did finish, so no apologies; just a review.

Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys, comes to me at a time when I'm just discovering Lovecraft. I've read some stories, which I liked, and some books that are influenced by him, which I've mostly also enjoyed. There's some great horror to be had, both in his writing and in his imagery and ideas. I literally CANNOT with the racism, but I've had good luck mostly avoiding it in what I've read so far. But the eeriness, the sense of cosmic unease that he puts in the most innocuous parts of his stories--the feeling of damp that permeates everything he writes is gloriously creepy.

So I can't really figure out why this story exists. Winter Tide is what happens when you take Lovecraft's cosmology and folklore and imagine it as innocuous. This is a world in which humanity is more frightening than the Old Ones, who are just like any other gods--distant and cosmic and pretty much not there. Only humanity isn't actually that frightening here. I guess government is?

It's the story of the people of Innsmouth, the weird village near Arkham where the people worship Cthulu and the gods of the sea. I haven't read the Cthulu books, but I saw a TV movie about this once and it was amazingly creepy and freaky, a trashy delight. The joy and terror are missing here, because it turns out that those people were misunderstood, not evil, no blood sacrifice (well, maybe they nick their own fingers when doing magic, but that's all!), no unspeakable evil. Just good folks who turn into fish creatures when they finish with their landwalker stage and go to live in the ocean, misunderstood by us airbreathers and interned and murdered for it.


So really, the emotional heft of this story belongs to Aphra and her brother Caleb being the only survivors of their race after being interned in camps between the world wars. Eventually, they are joined by Japanese citizens, and when the war ends and they're released, these last two survivors leave with their new adopted family. This is about loss of legacy and trying to heal, about being out of place and trying to find your heritage. Which is a great idea, and there's so much to do with that.

But there just wasn't enough story to back it up. Too many characters swirling around--with some great, really lovely representation, but so many that you don't get to know them. Dawson should have her own book, but she barely gets a line here. Neko exists to show that Aphra has ties. Why is Charlie even there? (I think because this is a sequel to a story in which Charlie features.) Audrey ends up being a main character, but darn if she didn't just feel like another pile of clothes to get in the way for the first half of the story.

Having gotten to the end, I feel confident that this would have been much better as a novella. There was a lot of time spent telling characters things that other characters already knew, and deciding whether to tell them things that we'd just told other people. In theory there are secrets, but everyone shares them with each other promptly (and generally in separate conversations), so they don't feel that tense.

I think this just might not be the book for me. It could have been an exciting story about....something happening at Miskatonic University (I keep forgetting what the plot of the book is--they want to do research for what feels like a MacGuffin reason) or it could have been an intriguing character study of a person trying to figure out what it means to be connected to a world that tried to cut all your ties. But there was just too much distance for a character story, and too much stillness for a mystery.

And...really, if you're going to make the Old Ones NOT want to destroy the world and devour humanity and set men mad on sight--why bother writing Lovecraft? It's like making a Mission Impossible movie about those quiet moments of friendship you share with your team, not talking but just being together without any agenda. I just didn't get it.