I’m returning once again to the idea of what, exactly, makes a book cozy. A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall is a sweet, slow-paced epistolary novel full of very kind people. But it’s also about two people trying to figure out what happened to their respective siblings, who are presumed dead. It’s very much a book about grief, but it deals with this grief (and with characters’ mental illness, disabilities, and trauma) in such a gentle way that it still manages to feel cozy.
Sophy, a former researcher, and Vyerin, a navigator, live in a watery world and they are trying to figure out what happened to Sophy’s sister E. and Vyerin’s brother Henerey when the underwater house that Sophy and E. grew up in was destroyed. E. and Henerey were both at the home when disaster struck, but their bodies weren’t recovered from the wreckage. Sophy and Vyerin are combing through their siblings’ letters, journal entries, and other ephemera to try to reconstruct the events leading to the tragedy.
This novel is pure epistolary; while some books advertised as epistolaries intersperse more narrative chapters between the correspondence, everything in this book happens in a letter or other communication. Sophy and Vyerin send each other letters alongside the correspondence they’re sharing from their siblings. Even when either pair ends up meeting in person, we only hear about it in the messages they send after the fact. This contributes to the slow and gentle nature of the book — as a reader I felt very removed from the action, and I also felt like things sort of dragged along a bit.
It’s hard to know whether to categorize this book as a fantasy or science fiction. There’s no magic, but the setting feels fantastic. The world was flooded when the characters’ ancestors’ floating cities plunged into the oceans below. I wasn’t really clear whether these were space ships, or either technical or magical floating islands. The current tech level has a sort of steampunk-y feeling. With the watery setting, it’s very Jules Verne. There’s submersibles and diving suits, and of course, the underwater house that Sophy and E.’s mother built, which is famous for the ingenuity of its design.
The book is also something of a romance. E. and Henerey have a lovely relationship that grows through their letters. Sophy and Vyerin also develop a beautiful relationship, but as they are both happily married to other people, theirs is a friendship borne out of their shared grief, curiosity, and support for each other. In some ways I actually liked this relationship better because I love to see friendship take center stage in a book, and I especially like to see books that show married people having important friendships outside their marriage.
A Letter to the Luminous Deep is a very queer book. Sophy and Vyerin are both in same-sex marriages, which appears to be quite normal in this world. There’s at least one non-binary side character and some asexual representation as well. There was no explicitly binary trans rep, but this also felt like the sort of mannerly world where it would be absolutely gauche to do anything but accept someone’s gender identity without considering what they may have been assigned at birth.
(Vyerin and his husband are parents. I don’t know if the reader is to assume that one of them was born with a uterus and carried their children, or if they adopted or used a surrogate. The fact of them having children is treated as a complete non-issue)
Ultimately, while I can see a lot of people really loving this book, it was simply too slow-paced for me. It’s the first half of the duology, and I can’t see myself picking up another book of this length and pace to get answers about what happened to E. and Henerey. While the events of this first book set up the possibility of the second book not being an epistolary, the fact that it’s titled A Letter to the Lonesome Shore leads me to suspect the author is going to stick with this format.
I do think people who enjoy a really gentle, slow-paced novel that deals with serious issues while still feeling cozy will really love it. It does seem to be finding its readers!
CWs and TWs: References to past parental death; depictions of anxiety, including social anxiety and agoraphobia, and some ableism directed to people with mental illness.
Source and Format: I read this as an ebook from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Book Bingo Prompts
SBTB Summer Romance: Epistolary Romance. I mean I don’t feel like I have to justify this one at all.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 20 out of 25 prompts complete. 3 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 17 out of 25 prompts complete. 3 bingos.
SAL/SPL Adult Summer Reading: 21 out of 23 prompts complete, 6 bingos.
SBTB Summer Romance: 7 out of 24 prompts complete, 0 bingos.