Charlotte Kersten

Summary

Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah is not the same. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has brought part of it back with her, onto dry land and into their home.

Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.

My Thoughts

I read this for my 2025 Under the Sea square for r/fantasy bingo, as I imagine many other fellow bingo-ers will…

I feel almost exactly the same about this as I do Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. They are both pieces of sharp, impressive writing by authors who are clearly immensely talented, there are fascinating speculative elements that are not quite explored to their full potential, and while I love the ideas that are touched on related to trauma and queer relationships, I just never came to care a whole lot while I was reading.

Early on, our narrator Miri observes that love is hard to describe because it is always extremely boring to hear other people talk about the details of their partners and relationships when you don’t share their feelings…and then she goes on to describe the details of her partner and their relationship before her partner’s Submersion in a great amount of detail, effectively proving her point that it is, in fact, kind of boring. This, combined with the amount of repetition in the present day part of the story, definitely made part of my reading experience less engaging than I’d hoped.

That being said, the book’s exploration of the messiness of grief and letting someone you love go can be quite incisive at times, ugly and raw especially in confronting Miri’s more “unflattering” reflections and the extreme painfulness of hope and clinging to possibility. There are also some glimmers of humor, such as Miri drunkenly hate-commenting on a forum for women roleplaying that their husbands are lost in space.

The snippets of Leah’s experiences stuck in the submarine are gripping and fascinating, especially in how they manage to combine a kind of detached numbness and lurking dread. I was interested in each morsel that was dropped about horrors of the deep and the ominous Centre funding the disastrous (?) expedition.

Ultimately, though, I can’t help but feel that these two parts are married together just a bit unsuccessfully. I like it as a meditation on grief and a piece of speculative horror, but something about the combination doesn’t feel wholly, entirely satisfying to me. I don’t regret reading it by any means, but I don’t think it’s one that will stay with me.