Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.
By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.
It also scared the life out of me. It's not a particularly long book, and I was expecting to read it rather quickly. But there was too much going on that mirrored real life and so I had to put it down and take more breaks than I anticipated. I've never been a huge fan of the deep-sea exploration trope. Part of me finds it baffling that we know more about space than we do about the depths of our own planet. And yet, there's another part of me that feels it would be better if it stayed that way. If we disturb things in our ocean depths...they're a lot closer to home than light years away.
So was this a book about exploring the depths of the seas or the depths of human relationships? Yes. It was that. Both of them simultaneously. Maybe to mirror just how little we understand about human connection? I don't know, but I think it did it well. How far will you go to get back to the people you loved and the life you knew? How hard do you work to honor connections and love that are changed and twisted into new shapes that you may not recognize?
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