Adult author Ava Reid’s debut into young adult literature, “A Study in Drowning,” has been met with hype that, quite frankly, I don’t understand — and not because I don’t want to understand it. On the surface, this sounds like exactly the kind of book I would love. The fantasy-mystery novel follows a first-year architecture student, Effy Sayre, as she’s contracted to redesign her favorite author’s crumbling seaside mansion and save it from falling to the waves below. At the same time, Effy’s academic rival Preston Héloury attempts to prove the author was a fraud by showing that his most famous work, “Angharad,” was penned by another uncredited writer.
Working together, the students follow a loose set of clues to discover the truth — whatever it may be — about the elusive Emrys Myrddin once and for all. However, in an attempt to push an overly simplistic feminist message, the book fails to create any real story to grasp onto. Perhaps even worse, it fails to criticize several problematic ideas that it brings up then subsequently forgets to address, potentially leaving readers not just confused but offended, too.
Although she leaves her university in the beginning of the story to travel to Hiraeth Manor, where the majority of the book takes place, Effy’s time at school stays with her. Specifically, the discrimination she faced there as the only female architecture student is a constant point of tension throughout the text; the fact that she was denied acceptance into the university’s more prestigious literature college because it doesn’t accept women (despite having the test scores to qualify) is a driving force behind the plot. Despite her previous reservations about outing her favorite author as a fake, Effy agrees to help Preston on his thesis with the promise of being added as a co-author and (hopefully) receiving acceptance to the literature college — the school she really wants to be in. This agreement is what ultimately sets the story off after a somewhat slow start. Following this, the novel features prominent discussions on the historical exclusion and erasure of women in academia, misogyny in healthcare and finding one’s own inner strength.
I have no problems with the book’s messages. Yet, while the central ideas of the story are powerful, it feels like the book itself is a series of plot points constructed around a message, rather than a story from which meaning is able to naturally emerge. As a result, its themes feel muddled and confused, ultimately leaving readers wanting more. Intellectually, I understand what the author is trying to tell me, especially as a woman myself. But I only see it loosely reflected on the page — that is, until the moments it decides to leap out, shake my shoulders and scream at me what it is and how it wants me to feel about that. Unintentionally, the book weakens its own message by not letting readers come to their own conclusions and confusing the plot with things that, in an attempt to conceal its own hand, seem to have no real place in the story.
For instance, the world of this novel feels like a distraction rather than something that adds anything truly meaningful to the text. Until now, I’ve avoided discussing the elements that make “A Study in Drowning” a fantasy novel because, in all truth, it doesn’t read very much like one. The reason for this, I suspect, is that what that makes this book fall under the fantasy genre — the existence of a fae race — only ever really exists in the context of readers being made to believe it’s a symptom of Effy’s hallucinations, which she has been ostracized for and taken “pink pills” to prevent since childhood. Because we aren’t supposed to know if what Effy sees is real until the very end, we spend more time trying to understand the rules of the fantasy world and discern what’s real or not than we do paying attention to the things the book actually wants us to care about. The setting feels incidental to the plot until it suddenly isn’t anymore, which is jarring and confusing for the reader; if it were to be taken out of the book completely, the main story would hardly change.
This also leads to an unsettling depiction of mental illness that is never really challenged within the text. Instead, the protagonist is redeemed from being “crazy” by having her hallucinations proved to be real. While I believe this aspect of the novel was intended to be a criticism of the way women have historically been deemed “hysterical” and not treated as capable of understanding their own experiences by healthcare systems, I find the way this book depicted things like the stigmatization of mental health and use of medication to be upsetting and potentially even harmful. By not exploring these themes with any nuance or depth, it reads as if the book is cosigning these ideas rather than critiquing them.
One of the most significant ways this comes across is in the romance between Effy and Preston, the latter of whom never actually believes that what Effy claims to see is real. Instead, Effy settles for him choosing to “(believe) her fear, her grief, her desire. That had to be enough.” In essence, he believes that she believes what she sees, which makes it real for her. And in the end, she accepts this, telling readers that it’s okay for someone to tell you your reality is false, so long as they “love” you despite it. I don’t feel as though I need to explain why someone’s romantic partner insisting that they’re “seeing things” is bad, nor why featuring that as the only “healthy” male-female relationship in a novel is problematic.
For a story that deals so heavily with gendered themes, its depiction of gender is two-dimensional at best. Save the love interest, every man is the same sexist, predatory monster, while every woman is the same tempting, innocent (and ultimately tragic) victim. Again, as a woman, I will never deny that there are a lot of really scary men in the world. But these scary, bad men are still people, and the men in Reid’s novel feel more like caricatures than anything else. The women are no better, either portrayed as lesbians who are made invincible (and invisible) by their sexuality or as hapless prey to the male gaze and violence. The book’s refusal to allow any nuance to bleed into its depictions makes all of the book’s themes on gender fall flat and leave no impact.
In the end, “A Study in Drowning” tries to do so much that it does nothing well. It wants to be a fantasy novel, but doesn’t develop the world or magic system enough for readers to understand; it wants to be a mystery thriller, but is so predictable I guessed the major plot twist in the first conversation it was introduced; it wants to cater to the dark academia trend, but seems to forget Effy is a student of architecture the moment it isn’t convenient for the plot anymore. It wants to say something, desperately, but fails to do so because it has nothing new to say.
Daily Arts Writer Camille Nagy can be reached at camnagy@umich.edu.