Book Review: The Girl Who Broke the Sea by A. Connors
Published: February 2nd 2023 by Scholastic
Rating: ★★★★ (4)
Genre: Young Adult // Sci-Fi, Thriller
Quick Thoughts: The Girl Who Broke The Sea opened up a somewhat chasm within myself, one that felt Lily’s heart echoing back at me.
About The Book:
Lily’s emotional problems run deep – three miles deep.
After she gets kicked out of school for her destructive behaviour, Lily agrees to an unusual fresh start: going with her mum to live at Deephaven, an experimental deep-sea mining rig and research station located at the bottom of the ocean.Lily instantly regrets her decision: claustrophobic and isolated, it’s hardly her idea of home.
Turns out, Deephaven has problems of its own. The head scientist, they quickly learn, has disappeared – just as he was on the brink of a shocking discovery. In the darkness of the deep, something is stirring … something dangerous.
And it’s calling out to Lily.
A mind-expanding thriller set in the ocean’s depths, a terrifying struggle for survival – and the story of one girl’s path to self-acceptance.
Writer A. Connors is an exciting debut author writing for teens and young adults
Perfect for fans of Lauren James, Marie Lu and Marissa Meyer
First Thoughts
It’s been AGES since I read a Sci-Fi Thriller and when I heard about The Girl Who Broke the Sea, it felt like the perfect re-intro to the genre! Not only is the ARC stunning, but the finished copy looks, and sounds, just as ethereal.
My Review
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!
About The Author
A. Connors is a former physicist and former child who likes writing stories and building unlikely, poorly thought through gadgets.
His favourite bio tidbits include: spending his PHD underground at CERN, helping design one of the detectors for the Large Hadron Collider; teaching physics in Sudan; selling encyclopaedias in Chicago and fitting Wi-Fi in the refugee camps in Greece.
In his spare time he manages an engineering team for Google Health, a project that aims to use big data and machine learning to improve the quality of healthcare. He lives in Hertfordshire with his partner, two boys, and a dog.
His debut transformative and spine-tingling teen novel, THE GIRL WHO BROKE THE SEA, will be published by Scholastic UK in Feb 2023.
Have you read The Girl Who Broke The Sea?
If you haven’t, don’t forget to add it to your TBR!
Let me know in the comments or on twitter @LittleMemoirs!
happy reading!