Freshwater

More of a 3.5 than a 3 for me.

Freshwater is an incredibly creative debut novel with beautiful prose. We follow Ada's life from the womb to adulthood, a vessel for gods who are unable to leave her body and immerge as new personalities after Ada undergoes traumatic experiences.

I enjoyed the overall themes of the book, but what I found difficult was the storytelling and how the reader learns about Ada. There was a lot of jumping around and new context to past versions of Ada that we don't find out until much later, which feels kind of bad as a reader. Why is the author withholding important character progression from Ada's childhood until the last few chapters? There's no payoff in doing that, and it just feels like new information comes out of nowhere without any warning.

We also don't really learn much about Ada herself, only how she lives through others (mostly men) and how her alters/gods within her (Asughara and Saint Vincent) push her to self harm and pursue sexual opportunities. It became difficult to keep up with all the characters she was interacting with and really could have focused more on the few more impactful characters in Ada's story to drive more character development. There are only so many sexcapades you can read about until they all start blending together into a depressing blob of sweat and shame (for Ada at least).

It felt a lot more shallow than I was hoping, I guess. I was expecting some more mysticism, more about Ada's “real mother” (the snake), more ways the gods effected her than just causing her to harm herself or sleep with people. We don't learn much about Ada's studies, career, friendships, detailed world-travels, or daily interactions and how they're affected by her condition.

There were some really outstanding moments in the book and a lot of very confusing, bland, or unresolved moments too. What shines in this book is the prose and the themes.