Member Reviews
Lesbian pirates!!
I think if I had read this sooner then I probably would have liked it more but after reading hundreds of other sapphic books it just didn't really live up to some of the favourites that I already have.
It was definitely a fun read but the ending did feel slightly rushed for me which impacted how much I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the romance in this and that even despite the conflict that was thrown at them, they were still pretty solid. I think it could have been a little bit more focused on the main plot and either have been expanded to fit in the side plots or tightened up.
Badass lesbian pirates and terrifying sea monsters! What more do you need?
THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS is the powerful, white-knuckled seastorm of a sequel to THE ABYSS SURROUNDS US. What a conclusion to the duology.
After reading the first book in the series, I was eager to read this one too. Thankfully, it didn't disappoint and was a wonderful continuation.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book and chose to review it. This in no way impacts my opinion on the novel.
Yikes. I generally don't write DNF reviews on here but this is one that I think y'all should see. Because I really liked THE ABYSS SURROUNDS US so this should have been a book I also really liked. But it was not. Where THE ABYSS SURROUNDS US had good worldbuilding, monsters, and charm, THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS felt like a whole other world and one that was devoid of joy.
The characters this time around were annoying to me. I thought that Cas and Swift's relationship was heading in the right direction before but this time around I was just frustrated. They were sorta happy, then fighting, then sorta happy again, then angsty just to add ~drama~ and at that point I realized this probably wasn't the book for me.
I rated this two stars on Goodreads so that my review would show up on the webpage, but man oh man. I feel as though if I had finished, I probably would have rated it one star. I did read some spoilers and there is a major character death that everyone said seemed forced so that would have probably docked a star for me.
I'm sure you're thinking: "But if you didn't finish, how can you talk about this book?" Well, I didn't finish because I thought the first 25% was terrible and I didn't want to even bother putting myself through the other 75%. So judge me and this review if you want, but I give zero cares except I don't mean cares.
This series never quite kicked into the high gear I wanted, but it's super fun, fast-paced, and energetic. Plus, f/f sci fi that features endless strong women is automatically pretty awesome. I recommend highly to readers who are just venturing into the waters of SFF, because this is a really friendly light sci fi novel.
This is my first time reading this author, but won't be the last! I love the world Emily Skrutskie created, and am excited to see what other stories she creates!
This series is such a delight. It's different from anything else I've read before. I love this universe, and our main characters. It's a shame how difficult it is to find good fiction featuring queer ladies, and this is a fantastic one that I recommend often.
It's as good as the first book, and my only complaint is that I could have read a hundred pages more, at least! I couldn't put the book down, and it was great to reunite with the characters I already loved from the first book.
The action was great! And what can I say about the main characters? Great development there.
There was so much action in the conclusion of Emily Skrutskie's duology. I feel like no sooner did I open this book than I was blown away by everything happening in it.
Pirates! Ship fights! Fights against monsters! Hellbeasts!
Those were the parts that I did love. The parts that I didn't love quite so much were everything between Cas and Swift. And I had quite a lot of problems with the pacing of the novel itself, and the importance it put on some characters who were simply disposed of in a simple paragraph with no forewarning.
I think it was also the fact that all my favourite parts of the last book had to do with a life that Cas no longer has. Bao's presence did not make up for Durgo's loss in any way. I almost felt sorry for Bao's connection being to Cas rather than to the ship, because we really saw nothing like that intensity of feeling coming back from Cas.
And, at the end, it was so quickly all pieced together, I couldn't help but think that the words that were used for all of that angst between Swift and Cas would have been better used fleshing out that ending.
This is a duology that needs to be on everybody's radar! I started with The Abyss Surrounds Us last month, hooked on the promise of sea monsters (yep, that's all it takes to grab my attention) and fell in love with the characters and world.
Cas is a former Reckoner trainer. Basically she played with massive sea monsters that were bred to destroy ships. How cool is that?! And last time around her loyalties were seriously tested but she's chillin' with the pirates now and her maybe-girlfriend Swift.
In terms of the story, this one moved a bit slower than the last for me. There's a lot of action but it's segmented and I was jolted back and forth between those quicker scenes and the rest of the story building up the relationship between Cas and Swift, Cas and the crew, and Cas and her role in the grand scheme of the sea. I didn't get through this in one shot, putting it down during these slower parts. Yet I loved the story, and it wraps up neatly with potential for a future book if the author felt like writing one while also leaving me satisfied with each of the storylines.
Cas has become one of my favorite characters. She's beautifully flawed and a lot of fun to follow from a reader's perspective. One of the things I loved about this book was how Cas didn't have to sacrifice vulnerability to be a strong heroine. I feel like, so often, the characters who are "strong" in books can't be anything else. That's the category they're thrown into and it limits their growth.
Skrutskie threw that out the window and wrote a character who was strong, resourceful, uncertain, stubborn, smart, passionate, vulnerable... the list goes on. You get all sides of Cas and I tried to think of other books where that stood out to me and I can't. It's crazy, because I love so many books and so many characters but when I starting thinking about it, I couldn't think of one that compared to Cas in multi-dimensional-ness. At least not in the span of two books.
Not to mention I ship Cas and Swift so hard, and Swift is another one of those intricately written characters I've fallen in love with. Their romance is so raw and real. The uncertainty of the future, the conflicting emotions and loyalties to themselves, each other, and the crew. Each part of their lives impacted their relationship in the way that these things do and I think it made it all the better.
In short, a fantastic story of loyalty and personal strength about a girl who trains sea monsters and her life as a pirate. Awesome futuristic world, F/F romance, (once more for the people in the back) SEA MONSTERS. Yeah, get excited. If that sounds like something you're interested in, grab yourself a copy of The Abyss Surrounds Us and The Edge of the Abyss!
I good follow-up! I love the world Skrutskie created and Cass and Swift are adorable!! Still something missing in terms of making me LOVE it but I did have a good time reading it.
This is even better than the first book!
The stakes were higher, Cas and Swift's romance was both more complicated and stronger, and everything about Cas' characters arc is amazing. I loved the story itself. I also both love and hate Santa Elena at the same time for doing that to my girls.
I had a minor issue with the ending, thinking it could have been more explored and given more time -- maybe a bigger battle and just pacing it out more evenly so we could gather the magnificency of the thing.
ANYWAY THIS IS AN EXCELLENT DUOLOGY, AND Y'ALL TRIPPING IF YOU DON'T PICK IT UP.
The sequel to 2016’s The Abyss Surrounds Us, it is as thrilling and awesome as one would hope. Set only three weeks after the end of book one, tension still hangs in the air, and questions keep piling up. No big spoilers here, but I gotta tell you, the chemistry between the MC and the love interest is so darn palpable it physically hurts. And oh my oh my, was this an angsty read. I gotta say though, I love angst.
We learn so much more about Reckoners here; we see them interact, fight, be in a place they weren’t designed to live in. The world and the characters are so well built, and you are guaranteed to swoon.
It’s been almost a year and a half since I read The Abyss Surrounds Us, but within a few pages of The Edge of the Abyss, I was sucked back into Cas’s world of pirates and sea monsters. This was a fantastic conclusion to a well-written, action-packed sci-fi adventure in a world that’s easy to imagine.
Picking up shortly after where the first book ended, Cas has left her life as a Reckoner trainer and sworn allegiance to the totally badass pirate queen, Santa Elena. As one of Santa Elena’s chosen few, she’s in training to one day take over as captain of the Minnow. Her one advantage is an extensive knowledge of Reckoners, which puts her at the forefront when the crew discover the rogue Reckoners that are swimming free in the NeoPacific and could cause irreparable damage in many ways.
I loved how The Edge of the Abyss built on The Abyss Surrounds Us. In this book, we get to see more of the pirates themselves and learn about pirate politics, which was fascinating. We get to see more growth from Cas, and we also get to see more of the secondary characters, which I liked. They became real people for me in this book, a true supporting cast.
I have slightly mixed feelings about the romance in this one. On the one hand, I understand Cas’s hurt and anger and being unsure whether she can forgive Swift for the things that came to light at the end of the first book. She and Swift are finally on equal footing, but so much has happened that seems impossible to get past. Their relationship was always complex, and I appreciated the slow burn of it, but there was almost too much back and forth. Cas has a lot to deal with besides her feelings for Swift - guilt over leaving her life and family behind, uncertainty over her future, trying to figure out a plan to deal with the Reckoners - so while I would have easily understood the romance not being a main focus of the plot, the way it was handled makes the plot feel choppy at times. That being said, the emotions were realistic. Their romance was never hearts and rainbows, full of mushy sentiments and pledges of eternal love, and that made it more realistic than a lot of other YA romances because young love is often rocky and uncertain and confusing. I was ultimately satisfied and I appreciated how things ended, but the rocky ride was a bit tiresome at times.
The Edge of the Abyss is fast paced, engaging, and full of thrilling action and great characters. I’d love to see this duology turned into a movie or TV series.
It’s been a few days since I actually finished reading The Edge of the Abyss and I’m just struggling with writing the review. This sequel/finale was so satisfying. I haven’t finished a series in a good amount of time and as such I’m currently unfamiliar with this feeling: I loved the story, I love how it ended, I loved having my questions answered, and I miss the characters and want more anyway.
Skrutskie really amped up the romantic angst in book 2. I mean, there was a lot of push and pull in The Abyss Surrounds Us but if you thought that was broody and dramatic, just wait until you read this one. Swift and Cas are even more at odds with one another while still growing ever closer at the same time. They were pitted against one another but pushed into close quarters for the majority of the book. It made for quite the amount of frustration; but the good kind, the kind that makes you wanna bash their faces together and make them kiss. I loved where their romance sat when the final page drew to a close. I thought it was brave and I’d love to see more of it.
The best parts of book 1 were turned up to an eleven for book 2. Sea monsters!! And not just one sea monster as a companion to the Minnow, but an entire PACK of SEA MONSTERS. Like 50!! There was even more action and more thrills and more enormous, terrifying sea monsters in The Edge of the Abyss. This whole world is something I think this series does so well and getting to see more of it was great. The epic battle at the end was everything I was hoping for, with the exception of a single trope. It’s nothing offensive or anything I’d rant about, but it’s something I thought was on its way out the door and I was sad to see it here. I just hate when a character blacks out and then the most difficult things have been dealt with while they were gone. Like the end of the Hunger Games trilogy. « Hide Spoiler
The way a certain death went down just had me reeling. I didn’t even know what to feel, and it was over in the blink of an eye. I mean, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to cry. The whole thing was amazingly absurd but also perfectly hilarious. I wasn’t expecting it at all and I literally laughed out loud when it happened.
What lacked for me in this book was a sense of purpose. I understood that Cas was grappling with that, but I didn’t appreciate that the book and its plot were also grappling with that same issue. In the first book, the goal was clear: get the hell away from these crazy pirates and make it back home to safety. But this time, the whole future seemed like an amorphous black blob, and not just in the “what will I do now?” way that Cas was struggling with. There was no real solution to the problems that Cas faced, and honestly, they didn’t spend a whole lot of time working to find those solutions either. I don’t know how to explain this well, but I just feel like the plot wasn’t structured very well.
In the end, I thought this was a great conclusion. Structurally and technically maybe not the best book around. I wish the plot was stronger with more defined acts. But the characters were great, the romance was angsty and swoony and yay f/f sex!! I wish there were going to be more books but at the same time I’m left feeling wholly satisfied with where everything stands as it is.
This was a hard one for me to review - objectively, the author is quite talented; her characters leap off the page, there's a ton of action and adventure, this alternate reality she's crafted is amazingly original and the plot had me hooked. BUT I found the lead character so frustrating and some of her reactions and decisions were borderline nonsensical, so it was painful to read some parts and resist the urge to hurl my phone across the room and scream.
It’s a testament to the skill of the author that despite my profound irritation with Cas, I couldn’t put the book down, I simply HAD to keep reading and find out how she’d get out of this mess. I found her journey to be gripping, as the uncertain treacherous path she chose had very high-stakes and created a breathless adrenaline-rush of a reading experience.
Some books telegraph their ending a mile away in blazing ten-foot high neon signs, but I didn’t know what Cas would do or where she would end up from one chapter to the next, it was completely unpredictable. I never could’ve seen the ending coming if I had a thousand years to brainstorm possible outcomes, and yet when I look back over the journey, there was no other way it could’ve ended and the author chose a beautifully poetic and fitting way to conclude the duology.
But MY GOD, did I want to knock some sense into Cas’s thick head sometimes! The romantic arc was my main investment in the series as I adore LGBT+ relationship and the hook of lesbian pirates was irresistible. But the way Cas treated her love interest seriously vexed me – I understand that this person had committed an unforgivable sin in her eyes, and that’s fine, but then Cas would fall into her arms and passionately make out with her one moment, only to recoil and throw her out or run off the next. I can understand having conflicting emotions, but as a reader, this repetitive hot-cold-hot-cold situation was boring and made me roll my eyes when Cas threw a fit YET AGAIN and stormed off.
It made me feel so much sympathy to the love interest and wish that she could invest her affection in someone else instead of a person who would jerk her around like this. Perhaps the author was going for some irony as the love interest was in a position of power over Cas in the first book and didn’t treat her very well, but flipping the power dynamics this strongly in the reverse direction served to diminish her character as she was basically a doormat that let Cas walk all over her when she was in one of her moods. I did enjoy the parts of the book where they got to be happy with each other and there were some very sweet parts that made me grin, but it didn't last long before the drama started up again.
In summary, I had serious issues with the protagonist’s wildly vacillating emotional responses and questionable morals (killing innocents in the first book was something she did not get called out for and she never really reflected on it enough to justify it as an in-character action). However, the exciting story arc was strong enough to compensate for this and kept me turning the page, no matter how fierce my frustration and occasional desire to give up. This is a wonderfully complex and outstandingly original story that will be rewarding for those who don’t have the same issues with Cas as I do.
I think part of the reason I enjoyed this sligthly less than its predecessor was because I was sick while I was reading it. Not that it was necessarily any worse. My head was foggy, which made it harder to follow, so I guess my rating and review reflect that.
When Santa Elena’s ship, The Minnow, is attacked by a Reckoner without any trainer or companion ship, Cas Leung realises that it is another of Fabian Murphy’s beasts, sold to pirates who were unable to train it and turned it loose. Realising that this is just one of many, Santa Elena convenes The Salt, a network of pirates, to try to take back the oceans. But that’s going to be harder than it looks, and with Cas’s skills, she’s going to be right on the front line.
One thing I particularly enjoyed about this book that wasn’t really dealt with in the previous one was that Cas had to face up to how her disappearance affected her family. Some of my favourite scenes where those where she was trying to process that, and an eventual conversation she has with her brother, just before the climax.
As with the previous book, the plot is tight and the writing is solid. Cas’s relationship with Swift devleops at a good pace now that they are on equal footing, and I liked how complicated it got at times. There was just something that left me feeling a bit disengaged, though. As I said above, that may have been more on my end than Skrutskie’s. While I could see that technically, the book hit all the right boxes, I just wasn’t feeling it.
I love, love LOVE the concept of this series. The execution – maybe not so much. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, the US is now comprised of small independent territories, and the oceans are havens for pirates. Without citizenship on the land, people on the sea are forced to live in flotillas and floating islands. They depend on pirates for the goods needed to survive, so piracy flourishes. In order to combat them, Reckoners, huge water beasts, are bred and trained to defend a ship that they have been bonded with. What happens when the pirates try to harness the power and brutality of the Reckoners for themselves? Mass chaos and a threat that puts the ocean biosphere at risk.
The Edge of the Abyss picks up a month after The Abyss Surrounds Us. Cas is a trainee on Santa Elena’s ship, Minnow, and she’s being groomed to take over command of the ship from Santa Elena. There are five trainees vying for the coveted role of Elena’s heir, including Swift, the girl Cas has a love-hate relationship with. When Cas realizes that there are more untrained water beasts in the sea, she feels even more guilt at abandoning Elena’s pup, Bao. When she realizes that many of the other pirate ship captains also abandoned Reckoners, she fears that they will destroy the oceans. Suddenly, the petty bickering between the other trainees seems insignificant. Convincing Santa Elena that her livelihood is at sake, as well as the livelihood of every single person who relies on the ocean for a living, Cas must undertake her greatest challenge – track down the beasts and wipe them out.
As long as the story focused on the monsters, this was hard to put down. The back and forth squabbles between Swift and Cas, though, soon got irritating. Like in the first book, their relationship is not an easy thing. Swift killed Cas’ Reckoner, Durga, in the most horrific way possible, and she was also responsible for Cas’ capture by the pirates. Now that Cas is one of Elena’s trainees, they have even more friction between them. The see-saw romance got on my nerves. One minute they would work out their differences, and the next day – BOOM! Something else happened to put them at odds again, and frankly, it got old after the second or third time. Then I would hope for some monster action, to get things back on track again.
The battles with the Hellbeasts were well done. They were exciting and vividly described. I loved them. I wish there had been more of them. The ending resolution to all of the story threads was convincing and satisfying, and I’d even like to follow Cas, Swift, and Bao on more adventures, though with fewer personal upheavals.