Book Review: The Girl Who Broke the Sea by A. Connors

A fresh start is exact what Lily needs—in fact, it’s what she has to have. Dubbed as having “emotional problems” by her old school headmaster (“breaking stuff” issues for others) she is going with her Mum to Deephaven, an experimental mining rig, three miles under the sea, as part of a research station that her Mum has a new job with. It’s not the easiest place to feel at home in. Feeling alone, missing her Dad and best friend (who isn’t talking to her at the moment) back home, everything about Deephaven seems to remind Lily how far away she is from normality.

But upon settling in, Lily and her mother discover that the head scientist, Maximus—the one that offered her mother the job—has disappeared in a company owned submersible, just as he was making a new discovery. Suddenly Lily’s Mum might not have a job on the rig anymore, and there’s a boy in the makeshift Deephaven school that has lost his Dad, calling out for answers, just as Lily is. Feeling like something out in the ocean is calling to her, Lily doesn’t know whether she’s paranoid or onto something—and when Evan, Maximus’s son, becomes her closest confidant in finding out what his father was searching for—and what led to him abandoning his son—the more treacherously unnerving Deephaven, and the ocean, starts to become.

Overall, The Girl Who Broke The Sea opened up a somewhat chasm within myself, one that felt Lily’s heart echoing back at me. I felt deeply for her as she combatted loneliness, the mysterious puzzle aboard Deephaven, her Parents split, dealing with her rooted issues and ways of coping, all the way to feeling out of place—and then, finally, at home—on Deephaven. I must admit, the scientific aspects of the book went over my head (I was much more of an English Lit girl at school) but by the end, I learned to make my own kind of language with it. I thoroughly loved the book’s message, the absorbing plot, secondary characters, and you could really tell just how much dedication, thought and love went into the story. I think so many people will love it, too. A sparkling four-stars!