Fairytale and folklore-based stories are popular in genre fiction for a reason, and plenty of authors lean into their familiar beats and frameworks, using them as jumping-off points to explore darker or more complex modern-day issues. A Study in Drowning is author Ava Reid’s third novel, a story in which she once again embraces the sharp, jagged edges of folklore in order to explore larger and often uncomfortable truths.
A Study in Drowning is technically Reid’s first foray into writing YA fiction, but nothing about this tale talks down to its audience. Instead, it takes big swings and wrestles with complex questions of agency and trauma, including references to ongoing sexual assault and emotional abuse. It also deftly explores the way that misogyny and sexism can influence history—from which stories and achievements are deemed worth telling to the ways our understanding of the past is often deliberately framed to exclude female agency and participation. And though there is more overt romance, it is firmly couched in the story of one particular young woman’s healing journey.
The story follows Effy Sayre, who is the only female student at Llyr’s prestigious architecture college. An avid fan of her homeland’s national author, Emrys Myrddin, Effy particularly loves his sorrowful Angharad, the tale of a cruel Fairy King and the mortal woman he falls in love with. When she has the opportunity to enter a contest to redesign his family estate, Hiraeth Manor, as a sort of memorial to him and his works in the wake of his death, she jumps at the chance and, much to even her own surprise, wins.
But Effy’s descent into Myrddin’s world is nothing like what she expected: Hiraeth is a crumbling house on the edge of the sea, where boundaries between reality and fantasy blur all too easily and dark creatures lurk in the forest that surrounds the house. In this desolate place, it’s easy to embrace old ways — iron protectively strong across doorways, hag stones to help humans see more clearly, ash trees growing along the edges of the grounds—-and seek otherworldly protection from a nameless danger. More importantly, she slowly begins to understand that the man she spent so long mythologizing within her own mind had plenty of all too human flaws.
While at Hiraeth, she also meets Myrddin’s son Ianto, who is determined to keep his father’s legacy—and house—intact, as well as the brash young scholar Preston, who hails from a rival kingdom and is determined to discredit the famous author by proving he didn’t actually write his most well-known works. Desperate to protect her favorite writer’s reputation—and perhaps earn herself a position in the traditionally harsh-toward-women literature college in the process—Effy agrees to help Preston with his investigation, which brings the two rivals closer and puts them in much greater danger than either could have ever imagined.
Reid’s worldbuilding is lush and evocative, from the specific history behind Myrddin’s most famous work of writing to the larger folklore of Llyr, specifically in an impoverished area known as the Bottom Hundred, whose residents live in constant dread of the sea even as it provides most of them with their livelihoods. The clearly Welsh-inspired natural landscape manages to be both lovely and forbidding and the constant threat of drowning—both literally and metaphorically—runs throughout the book. (There are, after all, many more ways to drown than by simply being underwater.)
A Study in Drowning also deftly mixes Effy’s mental health struggles and recurrent PTSD with the themes at work in Angharad, as she desperately tries to determine what is real and what isn’t in the world around her. Though her slow-burn rivals-to-lovers romance with Preston is telegraphed from very early on in the book, it’s nevertheless incredibly satisfying to watch unfold, as both parties are forced to confront their internalized prejudices about each other’s cultures and pasts.
Combining several satisfying Gothic and dark academia tropes, Reid creates a story that flows as easily as the water that saturates its pages. It is a bit slower than her previous novels, and much of its action is cerebral, found in words, documents, and shifting belief structures rather than in overt violence or gore. And though there are frights to be found, a lot of its tension lies in the fact that neither we nor Effy—who takes pills to calm a variety of mental health issues—can be quite sure how much of we’re seeing is real, or how much of Myrddin’s stories were ever truly fictional. The blurry lines between fantasy and reality and the complex motivations of most of the book’s major characters, who are all willing to betray and use others for their own ends, makes it difficult t know who to trust, or which stories we’re meant to take at face value. But perhaps that’s part of the point, isn’t it? We’re all just stories in the end. It’s how we choose to tell them that matters.
A Study in Drowning is available now.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB