I think this book was translated from Spanish? I think something got lost in the translation. The descriptions of the characters and the road were really long and clunky. The dragged the book down. I liked the idea but about 2/3 of the way through it became such a slog, I had to force myself to finish it.

I have read earlier books ny this author and really liked them. This book however had a despicable main character and to me, a lousy ending. I will say in its defense, it was an interesting read. Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me an arc to this book.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

Sorry for the delay in my review, life has gotten in the way.

I have to agree with another review here that this would make an awesome movie / tv series.

the book was great... the author is talented. check it out.

This was my first book of this author. It was a little slow getting started but there were twists & turns to make it suspenseful.

This was my first book by this author, It was pretty enjoyable. I would give this book a 3.5 star rating! It was a pretty Quick and easy read!

When Frank and Grace abandon their old lives and take to the open road, they are trying to leave their troubles behind. But when they find a woman stranded in the woods, they find their nightmare is just beginning. Think LOST IN AMERICA meets DELIVERANCE and you've got it. Decent read.

This was a great read! The first few chapters I was wondering if it was some sort of horror as I was really quite scared of this soaking wet woman roaming the streets!
This would be a fantastic film/ series! So original and absolutely thrilling !👏

Woah, this book was creepy and intense! With some unexpected twists and turns!!

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own

At first, I really didn't know what to expect at all with this book. It's my first experience with the author (though I do have some of his earlier books in my TBR), and I didn't refresh my memory of the synopsis when I dove in. The initial chapters alternate perspectives, tracking the rather spooky movements of a mysterious women, juxtaposed alongside the normality of a family making preparations to leave their recent run of bad luck in Seattle behind for a fresh start in Boston. This beginning certainly draws you in, but leaves the reader unsettled and unsure just how these two storylines will intersect. Plus, there seems at first to be an almost supernatural quality to the mysterious woman, so even the genre feels a bit uncertain.

The plot solidifies in Idaho - a convergence of the storylines makes this shockingly clear just what direction this book is heading in. I really wasn't expecting this turn (Pen nicely plays homage to a film with a somewhat similar plot), but the twists keep coming and though the ultimate conclusion is a bit predictable, the book is still an enjoyable read from start to finish. I do wish that Mara's character, though well-developed, had a bit more satisfying of a conclusion in the end... the children's characters, also, never really came to life for me. Audrey's constantly socially aware comments didn't seem to be quite realistic having spent time around teenagers... And her younger brother seemed both too well-adjusted and his accident seemed unlikely considering his age. Other than these two points, I really enjoyed reading this a lot, though and am looking forward to checking out more from Pen in the future!

I would give this book six stars if I could! Under The Water was not at all what I was expecting and I thoroughly enjoyed not knowing what was coming next. It was well written and I only found a few minor grammar corrections throughout. The characters were all well developed and complex, and I liked finding out pieces of their backstories the further along I got. I would definitely recommend this to friends and thanks for the opportunity to read this book!

This book gave me literal chills and my skin crawl. The ending wasn’t what I expected! If you want something different for this thriller season, snag this book.

This was a great read. It makes me sad when I guess the ending. I can honestly say I had no idea what was going to happen. Very creative! The characters were well developed and believable. A perfect thriller. I will definitely look for more books by this author.

4.5/5

I can always count on Paul Pen to deliver a thriller I am going to enjoy.

In Under The Water, we meet Frank and Grace and their two children Audrey and Simon. Reeling after a period of bad luck plagued by strange events, illness, and life altering accidents, Frank has taken a job transfer and is moving the family across country in search of a fresh start and better luck. With their belongings sent ahead with movers, they start their new adventures by taking their new RV sightseeing along the way to their new home.

On a sparsely traveled road their bad luck resumes when they nearly collide with a woman who suddenly appears in the middle of the road. The R.V. is disabled after the near miss so Grace invites the woman, named Mara, to stay with them until morning. Frank is not being the most welcoming, and tensions are rising. For all the problems the family is trying to leave behind, the worst is yet to come.

Pen knows how to write a book with a slow creepy chill. He tells his stories through the characters that are multi-faceted, and well developed. It is always a pleasure to dive into one of his novels. I would love to say so much more about Under The Water, but to do so would reveal the secrets that make this book an experience to savor.

Paul Pen writes his novels in Spanish, and for Under The Water, he once again relies on the talented Simon Bruni to translate into English. Bruni has a gift for translating not only the words, but the nuances of the work as well. This is the third book that I have read from this writer and translator team (along with The Light Of The Fireflies, and Desert Flowers), and I can assure you that as long as they continue to work together I will continue to read their books. I am looking forward to their next collaboration - The Warning, scheduled for release February 4, 2020.

Another fantastic novel by a Paul Pen. The master of suspense. I love how one spur of the moment decision compounds into so much more.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an ARC of Under the Water by Paul Pen.
I have heard nice things about this author, but have not previously read any books by him. I had high hopes for the book because of the favorable reviews about a previous book. Unfortunately, my high expectations were not met. It was indeed a good book but not as good as i had wanted. I found many of the situations throughout to be unrealistic. I did like the way the book ended though.

This was me trying to read internationally. This was me trying to read quality literary books. I actually put down a silly creature feature and grabbed this one, thinking it would be a step up. No, no and no. Emphatically so. This was…what’s a polite way to say it…a pile of crap, a steaming one at that. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve hated a book so, there’s been some books I didn’t enjoy, but understood how others might, there’s been some books where the author/reader chemistry was off and there have been some turds, but this…this one took the proverbial sh*t cake. And because I can’t stand it when reviews just say this book was crap with no explanations, let’s get into it, shall we. Put on your best wellies, cause you’ll be wading up to your knees in this and let’s go. Plot first, of course. And here we have Frank and Grace and Frank and Grace have a perfect marriage. Picture perfect or, more accurately, vlog perfect, since that’s what Grace does, she posts videos on Youtube (the place where anyone can be somebody, even those who shouldn’t) about how loved up her family is. Two decades of marital bliss, two freakishly Stepfordlike perfect kids…you go, Grace. She’s as positive and optimistic as a person can be, in fact optimism is her defining quality, which is as annoying in a character as you can imagine. She’s basically asking for life to teach her a lesson and life does. You’re just not sure she’s smart enough to learn something from it. But at any rate, the lesson comes following a series of bizarre unpleasantries in their lives that results in Frank suggesting and then orchestrating move across the country. The happy family piles up into a Class A RV and whee, off they go. Only to find out that there is an unhinged female stalker on their trail with a very personal and very specific agenda. So far so good, right? Sounds like a decent enough thriller. It does, in fact, read like a fairly decent thriller to begin with, although slightly disjointed, owning for one thing to Paul Pen’s penchant for fleshing out side characters that only appear for a minute or so and situations that are nonessential. But then, once you figure out what’s going on and the standoff begins, it quickly spirals into something that gets progressively stupider with each chapter. And the thing is, if the book was just dumb and predictable, that’d be one thing, and, frankly, it would be fine, Not great, but fine. But no, what this book is is a statement. Or at least it reads like one. It reads very much like a personal statement of the author’s wokeness. It’s all like…aw, would you look at how progressive this dude is when it comes to gender dynamics, check him out spouting all the right jargon and espousing all the correct views. And Pen does this repeatedly, tiresomely so, through different characters, he hammers his message like his life depends on it. If someone talked like that in real life, you’d probably think…oh oh, the lady doth protest too much. But alas, this is fiction and fiction shouldn’t be used as a message platform, especially when the platform is essentially a mediocre retelling of Fatal Attraction. Does anyone watch Fatal Attraction and contemplate gender politics? No. You watch Fatal Attraction and contemplate how anyone cast Glenn Close (terrific actress, but unless you’re into mannish women, not all that sexy) as a femme fatale. Then again, that’s the 80s for you. They even tried to make Kathleen Turner into a sex symbol. Seriously? The most believable role she’s ever played was that of Chandler’s dad on Friends. But anyway…so yes, back to Paul Pen’s sh*tshow…so cheating is terrible. And men are terrible for rationalizing it. And women are not terrible, though they go through life considering themselves to be in a perfect marriage and manage to avoid sex for months, many months at a time. And women are not terrible when they decide to teach men lessons, there are just disturbed. And no fury like the woman scorned, though that may actually be too enlightened of a reference for a book like this one. And all is black and white in Pen’s universe and every other sentence is obnoxiously sanctimonious, all the more so when provided by an abnormally politically correct forgiving balanced children. And none of it all is even enough to offset Grace’s insanely (at levels where her intelligence might be questioned) sunny outlook. So to sum up, thus far, we have a trite plot heavily seasoned with obscene amount of proselytizing, thoroughly unlikeable and profoundly unbelievable (not in a good way, but literally unbelievable) characters and a fairly predictable narrative. By the end of it, you kind of just want to throw them all into the sulfur waters and forget the entire thing. In fact, the book’s best scenes occur under the water, so the title is apt. But the rest of the book…Pen tries to maintain the suspense, but can’t get out of his own way. The writing itself is decent enough, it’s meant to be literary suspense, it’s nearly there, just isn’t that good. Some of it might even have to do with translation, every so often a sentence is just so awkward and unnatural, it seems like it was done by a shoddy autotranslation program. But lo and behold, Paul Pen sells well(he’s even working on something with Netflix, though that’s neither here nor there, Netflix isn’t known for their quality control), specifically translated by this guy, he does. Maybe people just really respond to this pandering drivel, Koontz has done well off of it. But unless your goal in fictional reading is to have the author spew his enlightened PC opinions at you via a very (and I never use this word the way modern culture does, so this is a debut) basic thriller, pass…pass this book. Violence against books is abhorrent, but this one does belong under water somewhere. Pages waterlogged and unreadable. And the funny thing is, this was meant to be to expand my international reading. Paul Pen is Spanish, though you’d never know it, either by name or writing. Not even a courtesy of a foreign location, although US is technically foreign to him. Why would someone want to read a Spanish thriller set in the US, about a family who never left not just their country, but their state. The entire book takes place over two states. So it didn’t even check the international reading criteria, unless to serve as a reminder that sh*t writing is international and anyone can do it and it will most likely sell. So to wrap up, terrible book, stupid terrible book. MeToo feminism pandering rubbish that tries to speak of complexity of gender roles, but fails dramatically due to the author’s lack of talent and inability to give his characters enough dimensions to bare out his convictions. It isn’t all that literary, it isn’t all that thrilling and its well meaning intentions mostly serve to insult the reader’s intelligence with their clumsy repetitiveness. This book just pissed me off. Which resulted in (by far) the longest review I’ve ever written. I don’t know if anyone’s going to read it in its entirety and if you have (kudos and thanks), but if you’re skimming toward the end, this is it. Stay away, stay far far away. Thanks Netgalley.

Wow what a story really interesting book,loved the plot and the description of the character's,everything that seems perfect is not,.
A must read.

Under the Water is the story of Frank and Grace, married and together for 20 odd years, their children Audrey, 14 and Simon, 9. Following a series of unfortunate and distressing events in their lives they decide to up sticks from Seattle and move to Boston - taking 10 days in a state of the art RV to get there. When they decide to go off road to see some "off the tourist trail" hot springs in Idaho, they have an accident when a woman, Mara, steps out in front of their RV. Who is she and what is she doing in the middle of nowhere by herself?

This book started out exceptionally strong, with alternating chapters about Frank and Grace, and Mara. Mara's character comes across as really sinister and mysterious. Frank and Grace are the ultimate happy couple with their 2.4 children. I couldn't read fast enough and a superb twist at the halfway mark had me rubbing my hands in glee as I honest couldn't believe what I was reading! However, from there the book stalled for me quite a lot. It became overly descriptive with long passages about Frank, Grace and the scene on the isolated road. Mara's character lost its originality when I had initially thought she was an out and out nutjob, and Frank became more and more irritating. Grace's reaction to the whole situation at the end of the book was very unbelievable. I admit to skimming quite a lot of the book from the middle to the end as I kind of lost interest in the characters and what happened to them unfortunately.

Fantastic story. I really like this author. His stories are unique and suspenseful I’d highly recommend this book to all my frisps

I am extremely honored to be the first one to review this title! I received this ARC from the author himself. However, my review is a 100% unbiased and honest.

Paul Pen has this incredible style and his writing is unique. This book starts a bit different from his other titles, but it has the same hooking ability to intrigue the reader. He plays incredibly good with anti-heroes and the antagonists. We usually root and read stories from the perspective of the victims and the good characters. We read stories and we pick a side; however, Pen's books are not at all conventional, and it is impossible for you to take a side. I, at least, was struggling so much. You are at the edge of your sit, you cannot stop reading because you need to know what happens. This book has some Gone Girl vibes and crazy enough it is so different.

The character development is so good! They are dynamic and round. The characters changed throughout the story to the point of being unrecognizable. The characters are modern and relatable. One character in specific stressed me to the limit... but I think that is good for how good that character was created.

I can see this book becoming a movie. I wish it becomes a movie! This story is like watching Perfect Stranger with Halle Berry and Bruce Willis. This story is dark, mysterious, intriguing, well written, and if you love this story, it makes you wonder if you are sane or insane for being so excited with the reading.

I recommend this book fully! Stay tuned for my full blog review!