A review by lumie
A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.

I got fooled by the admittedly gorgeous cover, which clearly catfished me with a Hermione Granger look-alike, and no one can convince me otherwise. 

The writing is competent and the atmosphere fairly compelling, though the world building felt quite hazy at times with a lot of talk about warring neighbouring kingdoms and a supposed second drowning that's not particularly well explained. However I found the main character Effy to be so insufferable I couldn't bare it anymore and had to DNF the book. 

This book is sold as a enemies-to-lover gothic story. Are Effy and Preston enemies or rivals by any definition of the word? No. 

The girl has a one-sided hissyfit with the guy because he's a half-Argantian who requested the books in the library that she wanted to request (I know. How dare he?!)

And so she got so pissed at this completely irrational thing that as soon as she met him:

          She felt breathless. She had spent the last weeks conjuring a wicked version of P. Héloury in her mind, a perfect amalgam of everything she despised. A literature student. A shrewdly opportunistic Myrddin scholar. 
         
         An Argantian.
         
         “You’re the one who took out my books,” she said at last, the only words she could summon as her blood pulsed with adrenaline.
            The memory of standing in front of the circulation desk, the boy’s number in bleeding ink on the back of her hand, filled
            her with a jilted anger anew. “On Myrddin. I went to the library and the librarian told me they had all been checked out.”
         
         “Well, they’re not your books. That’s the entire premise of a library.”
    
         Effy just stared at him. Her hands were shaking. She had practiced arguments in her mind against her imagined version of P. Héloury, but now that she was standing before him, all eloquent reasoning had abandoned her.

Oh yeah the "eloquent reasoning" of: he can study literature and I can't, he requested the books I wanted and he's studying my favourite author, therefore he's the anti-christ! 

Girl what?

And she then goes on racist tirade because he's a foreigner who wishes to study her land's national writer (Yeah, how DARE he?!)

The straw that broke the camels back was Effy having the brilliant idea to walk from the house into the town, without telling anyone, during a downpour in a clearly dangerously unstable cliffside, because she panicked she did a bad decision. And then when Preston had the nerve to save her ass,  she goes:

“Put your seat belt on.”

He was trying to humiliate her, to treat her like a child. “My mother doesn’t even make me wear my seat belt,” she scoffed.
         
         “I don’t suppose your mother spends a lot of time driving you down half-sunken roads.”
         
         She couldn’t think of a clever reply to that. Preston had his seat belt on, and she was too cold and wet to argue. As she
            buckled herself in, she thought, You are so insufferable. She almost said it out loud.

Yeah, HOW DARE HE worry about your safety?!

And that's when I DNFd the book, because my god. I don't mind unlikeable characters, but this one was one of the most insufferable, rude, bitchy, argumentative for no reason characters I've had the misfortune of reading. So much so I went through the trouble of writing this all down.

In conclusion, If this kind of characterisation annoys you then don't read this book.