The Deep

weniger gut

I wanted to love this so much, something about the synopsis really spoke to me and I ordered it immediately, super excited.. sadly that didn't work out for me.
I disliked every single character (except Dai) in this. And I'm one of those people who need to feel for the character, need to be engaged, to care, to relate. If all the characters are unlikeable then I will not like the damn book. This is what happened here. The story itself is a little weird and convoluted but fine, it would probably even be interesting if I didn't root for the iceberg for most of the story. I just didn't care for 90% of the characters and kinda maybe wanted the rest of them to die in the upcoming tragedy (once again except for Dai). The main character, Annie, annoyed me so much that I literally couldn't bear to keep reading, it took me 19 days to finish this average-length book because of her. The second-hand embarrassment, the annoyance, the downright anger I felt at any and all of her POVs just took all the interest I had in the mystery.
Since it's been such a while since I started the book I don't even know if the story makes more sense if you don't read 5 other books in between, but I'm still a little lost tbh. That may also be because I simply don't want to understand what happened, I just want to know that Dai is well and found a better man than Les and is finally happy. The rest of the characters can go do whatever they're doing and never cross my path again.
I did enjoy the casual queer rep, I didn't expect that in this book and was very happy about that.
I'm still in love with this cover too, but I wouldn't recommend this to any character based readers. If you're just here for the mystery and plot and can deal with disliking everyone, then go for it, but if you can't, maybe skip this one.