Hello, bookworms!
Happy Sunday, we are now officially one week away from my birthday, can I get a wahoo? Actually, I don't really care about it, but I am going to eat my favourite cake (a Sicilian cake called Setteveli, made of seven tiers of chocolate), and that's a really good thing.
Anyways, today I am here to talk about Tears in the Water by Margherita Scialla, a queer contemporary slice of life by an Italian author who writes in English. One of my non written goals of 2023 is to read more books by indie authors and indie publisher, and this is one of them. It is also one of the aspec books I have decided to read for Valentine's Day month. I was so scared I wasn't gonna love this and I was ready to stop talking about books forever if that happened, but I can already spoil you that I ended up really enjoying it, so you're stuck with me babbling about books and reading all the times, I am sorry for you.
But let's cut this intro short, and let's get this review started!
About the book
Title: Tears in the Water
Series: Tears in the Water #1
Author: Margherita Scialla
Publisher: Self Published
Publication date: January 17, 2023
Pages: 295
Plot, as stated on Goodreads
A character-driven, slice-of-life contemporary story of love and self-discovery. At White Ravens University, where athletes train to become professional sportspeople, Alex is on the swimming team with her best friend, Xiuying. Having grown up mostly alone, parents absent and brother often busy with his own life, Alex tends not to meet new people unless she and Xiuying are together. After an embarrassing encounter with a boy from the volleyball team Alex soon discovers that the world isn't so big after all and the universe has a funny way of setting people up, especially when and with whom they're least expecting. Despite her reserved character, Alex becomes part of a newly formed friend group consisting of four amazing people with different identities and personalities. As she tries to overcome her anxiety and negative past events, Alex finds herself both struggling with romantic feelings for a new acquaintance and a full blown gender crisis.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Review
I am a huge fan of sports fiction, as I am also a big sports watcher and I love the idea of getting to know the other aspects of (fictional) athletes lives. I am also a fan of slice of life type of medias, because if I love the characters, I don't really care about a big plot.
So, you can imagine how hyped I was when I stumbled upon this book on Instagram, which not only was a sports fiction slice of life book, but also had a queer found family at its core. As soon as it came out, I purchased myself I physical copy, but then I waited to start it, because I was too scared I was not going to like it. I do this a lot, but this time around I had no reason to be hesitant, as it turned out, because this book was everything I hoped it to be.
I really fell in love with the characters, and I wish we had gotten to see more of them, because 295 pages are definitely not enough. Don't get me wrong, the "plot" was very well contained in the amount of pages the book had, I just wish we could have gotten to know the secondary characters a bit more, especially Xiuying. She is Alex's best friend, but we only got to see a little bit of their relationship, and that is the reason why I am giving the book 4 stars, instead of 5. Had it been more developed, maybe some twenty-ish more pages, I would have given this book the highest rating, because I really loved it.
I especially appreciated how diverse the cast was, and how queer normative this world (it's a contemporary set in an imagined place) is. I wish I lived there and attended the same college, to be honest. Maybe in this universe, my knee and back are still intact and I would be attending the school as a gymnast, who knows. I like volleyball and martial arts and I love swimming, but I would definitely be doing none of that, if I were there, lol.
Speaking about sports, I felt like there was a very good balance between the actual practice/meet time and the emotional/growth portion of the story. Sometimes, one overshadows the other, while in this case both of them were explored and talked about.
The mental health and queer rep was amazing, I want to applaud the author for doing such a great job at depicting anxiety and panic attacks on page, as well as Alex's struggles with gender. I related to every single bit of it, and it was a very cathartic experience for me, especially as I have not been feeling very good lately. I shed a tear or two, in particular when Alex was talking about body issues and trying out different pronouns and terms.
The writing style was smooth and easy to follow; there were a couple of sentences here and there that didn't feel right to me, and a few typos, but nothing too bad that I couldn't enjoy my time reading this book. I read it in one day, and I think it's a binge worthy read.
Overall, I really enjoyed Tears in the Water, and I am very curious to see what this author is going to do next, as well as to explore their backlist. I have already downloaded their two previous works, so you can expect me to review them some time in the future.
In the meantime, I would highly recommend checking this book out, because it's really worth it and you'd also be supporting an indie author, which is always a plus!
This is going to be all for today, I will talk to you soon with a new ARC review.
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