Firstly, apologies for the terrible picture – for some reason I couldn’t find a jpeg copy on the internet to grab, so I tried taking a photo off my computer screen with my phone, and it turned out rubbish. Soz.
Well, I’m generally a big fan of Sarah Painter’s books, I love both the Crow investigations series and the Unholy Island series, but… Beneath The Water was really not my cup of tea.
It’s kind of a romance, (think Beauty and the Beast where the beast is a poor little rich boy, Jamie, who is obsessed with weird health fads and beauty is a fragile female, Stella, on the rebound from a bad break-up) set a remote part of Scotland. Stella moves into the ‘big house’ when she gets a job as a personal assistant to the reclusive and unpopular Jamie. They find some old letters from a previous inhabitant of the house and are strangely invested in what happened to the letter writer. It was alright, but it didn’t have any magical realism and I didn’t completely believe the motivation of the characters and their choices. Ah well.
Sarah Wray Writer 