a hauntingly beautiful short story collection, The Sea Gives Up The Dead explores themes of family dynamics, love, grief and longing in historical as well as contemporary settings, with a fairytale twist in some. my personal favorite was "the princess wants for company", though i would definitely read a lot of these beautiful stories were they full length novels. will absolutely recommend this!

Short story collections are hard to rate because, as always, some stories resonated with me more than others. Across the board, though, the writing was beautiful and brought a bit of magic to each story. Grief was a recurring theme across the stories, handled each time in a really fascinating, nuanced way.

What a beautifully written book. Such sad subjects but the way they are written is magical. The words flowed from the page and so did my tears! I devoured this in one sitting. Beautiful, thank you.

As someone who normally wouldn’t pick up a short story collection, I really enjoyed this book. I think the length of each story was fitting and it didn’t feel like something was missing from each tale, which was my main issue with previous collections I've read.

As the title suggests, most of the stories deal with death as a main theme in very different and interesting ways. Not all stories were great, but I did like most of them (especially the last one). This book was quite a surprise for me and I was pleased by the experience.

Many thanks to Red Hen Press and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This review and many others can be viewed on my Goodreads page at the following link: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/80102102-ana