The Salt Grows Heavy

The Salt Grows Heavy

Cassandra Khaw

Enjoyment: 3.75Quality: 3.0Characters: 4.0Plot: 3.25

From USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw comes The Salt Grows Heavy, a razor-sharp and bewitching fairytale of discovering the darkness in the world, and the darkness within oneself. You may think you know how the fairytale goes: a mermaid comes to shore and weds the prince. But what the fables forget is that mermaids have teeth. And now, her daughters have devoured the kingdom and burned it to ashes. On the run, the mermaid is joined by a mysterious plague doctor with a darkness of their own. Deep in the eerie, snow-crusted forest, the pair stumble upon a village of ageless children who thirst for blood, and the three 'saints' who control them. The mermaid and her doctor must embrace the cruellest parts of their true nature if they hope to survive.


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  • Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    This was a short and wild ride with descriptive language that really leaves you reeling for a few different reasons, ranging from "ew wtf" to "can't you just say they coughed" to "I don't know half these words."

    Never the less, I enjoyed that ride. Worth the day it took me to read it between work tasks.

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    I'm... honestly just kinda confused?

    This book is like someone wrote a draft, and then for every other word they looked up the least used synonym for it. I'm really glad I read this on kindle as otherwise I'd have to strap a dictionary to the book lmao. Even kindle though was getting confused on some words - either just returning no results across the dictionary, wikipedia and translation, or just defining it as "abjective" and nothing more.

    The writing was just incredibly over the top and way too descriptive. My favourite part was "the parabola of my lower lip" like, what does that even mean lmao. The descriptions where so much that it was getting into the realm of not really making too much sense - sort of lead to it feeling like a dream, a sort of hazy stream of consciousness. And I'm not too sure on if I enjoyed that or not haha.

    Due to the style of writing I was actually pretty lost on what the story even was about. Cannibalism, cults(?) and magical science but nothing really seemed to connect too much together. Despite how descriptive the writing was, there wasn't that much world building and explanations for the systems and world so you're kinda just thrown in and expected to follow along.

    It's also supposed to be queer, but the only queer part I could see was the plague doctor was just... unknown gender? The MC uses they/them for them, but it's stated a fair few times that they just don't know their gender, they're androynous and all that - never explicitly saying they're non-binary or even alluding to that. 

    I think this is a read that you'll either like or you wont. The first paragraph alone will let you know if you'll like the writing or not.

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