That feeling when the silly slop book you wanted as a palette cleanser turns out to be satan's arse crack of eternal suffering, and you get held hostage for a month by a book you wanted to hate to its fullest potential.

What the fuck did I just put myself through? This was a story held together by second-hand dreams and a used glue stick. Everything about this feels like the author was making decisions as they were writing but didn't go back to make sure it aligned with everything they'd already written.

The writing alone is clunky and unpolished; there's spelling and grammar mistakes, sentences that don't make any sense, and a general feeling of the author going this is good enough without putting in the work to make sure it's all clean. If I had to read the phrase and, oh one more time, I was going to climb into this book and kill the characters myself.

The plot is so lacking. Effectively nothing happens for a good 80% of the book and then the final conflict lasts a chapter after a bunch of unearned, lazy plot twists occur to give the book a cartoonish villain to kill while leaving the consistently antagonistic character(s) unscathed.

The main pairing in this book is so bad, there are no redeeming qualities about them. If your main relationship is built on a foundation of isolation, it's a very shaky foundation to build off of--Mira is kidnapped in this book, she's held hostage with no other company besides and annoying little robot and the undine that's kidnapped her. Arges, our MMC, is shown to have a community, even if he's not in it much through the story, it's established he has brothers and a leadership position, and generally exists within the society we see him with. For Mira, we're told she feels unwelcome in her home and among her people, but we never actually see any of that ostracisation take place, we never see Mira with a normal cohort of humans ever, so we never get an understanding of what her day-to-day is like outside of this extreme scenario; what this does is make the relationship feel really unhealthy, it already has a risky power dynamic, but to tack on that your FMC has literally nobody else, makes the whole thing feel like manipulation, and makes Mira feel like half the character she could be.

I don't want to call it misogyny, but I do feel like there is an element of unconscious bias occurring in this book with the way Mira is treated and the way she speaks of herself. The one time she has a crash out over the situation she's in, getting genuinely, validly angry, these feelings are brushed aside because she's on her period. I'm all for the inclusion of periods in literature, because they are normal, but when you use one to effectively call your main woman dramatic, and then never speak of it again or have your monster MMC never discover it, it sends a certain kind of message.

As for the characters themselves as individuals, like I said, Mira is lacking. She starts out quite strong and fun, and I liked her POV more than Arges' but for a character effectively described as a no-nonsense, girlboss engineer, she does very little girlbossing, and even less engineering--for all the tech present in the narrative, we never see Mira do much tinkering or maintenance herself outside of what she's doing in the first couple chapters. On top of that, she becomes incredibly passive nigh on immediately, and not really in a I need to conserve my strength to get away sort of thing and more in a I'll just let the guy who kidnapped me make all the decisions and won't complain about anything ever kind of way.

The guy in question, Arges, I hate him so much. You will never meet anyone who hates Arges more than me. His entire POV consistently reads like some I'm fourteen and this is deep meme, and, in the first 70% of the book before the characters finally have sex (at 80%), is often a little uncomfortable to read. I don't like that Arges consistently called Mira disgusting or grotesque, I think there's ways of expressing a species' discomfort with another's biology without calling your future love interest grotesque but maybe that's just me. On top of that, he expresses a few times how he wants to dominate Mira sexually while still hating her, and that does make the roughness of the sex scene later bother me more than it usually would. Outside of Mira, he's just kind of a hypocrite, he yaps a lot about how he doesn't kill innocents but fully throws that code out the window in the final 'battle' where he just lets his people kill a bunch of humans because "they deserve it after all they've been through" and I hate to tell you this Arges, but revenge killing civillians is a war crime.

With the plot lacking and the relationship sucking, surely the worldbuilding must be a little better? Wrong. It's worse.

The locations in this book feel like set pieces, like you can see all the hot glue and tape used to keep everything together, and the characters are just barely floating in front of it rather than living in it. The reasons for the humans living/not living underwater are argued and inconsistent, the 'war' is lazy and not fleshed out in the slightest, and the city? The underwater city that is used in all it's marketing? You're in it for 20 pages at the beginning, and 20 pages at the end, if I'm being generous. 40 total pages in a 380 page book.

If I'm going to give the author any credit, I do think they wants you to see both sides of the conflict occurring in this book, with the humans living underwater and causing ecologicsl damage, while the undines want to kill them for effectively invading their land. However, the lack of city affects everything. Without it, we only see the undines being antagonistic towards the humans, with the only times the humans retaliate being when they're literally under attack. We never see the general populace of humans being that antagonistic of villainaous--Tau man excluded, he doesn't count for anything. We're told a lot, as is customary for this book, but we never see anything; not living in the city for any amount of time means we don't get to see both sides' bright spots or how the humans are perpetuating this conflict with the undines, if they even are.

Giving us more time in the city would have allowed a wider world to be felt. We'd have gotten a better understanding of how Alpha/Beta/Gamma work and had more chances to hint at Tau's existence, instead of having any semi-coherent worldbuilding being done in the literal epilogue. Then, with both Arges and Mira having their respective communities but still falling in love, it would have made everything feel a lot nicer and a lot sweeter; I could have bought their relationship more if it had been developed in that way.

Safe to say, if anyone ever associates this book with Bioshock ever again, I'm getting in a fight. I will save you all my Bioshock ramblings for now.

A couple silly things to close this out: I don't think this author knows how gills work. I genuinely can't tell if the undines having two sets of lungs or gills that expell air is a stylistic choice, or if Hamm just didn't research what gills do (which is facilitate the absorbtion of oxygen directly into the bloodstream, not to any type of lung) but it did keep throwing me off. Same with the consistent comments about sharks, there's a lot of talk about leaving people to get eaten by sharks, or about getting attacked by sharks and I don't know if this was the author's way of conveying that sharks were natural predators to undines, or if they just don't know that sharks don't typically hunt or eat people. She might just hate them, for all I know.

This book also doesn't pass the bechdel test and I wish I was joking.