The Sea in the Sky
by Jackson Musker
This feels a bit like a primer on deep sea diving at first. Despite that there was very little science in this science fiction. There was a lot of character chatter that could have taken place in any kind of novel. Then there is some drama, obviously. I have to confess that I did not care. The voice acting did not convince me. I considered a DNF, but the last three chapters turned up with something interesting after all.
I was disappointed that the sound effects did not include more atmospheric sounds, aka the sounds of the ship diving through the ocean, wind, ice, etc. Instead there was this meditation music soundtrack. And for parts with more tension, the tempo of that soundtrack just sped up. Less Zen-music and more planetary background noises would have been nice.
Bottomline, nice idea, the plot was not a bad one after all. But the execution did not really grab me. It was ok. Right now I would not get anything else in this world or from this author on Amazon Originals. Probably.
This is the first book I finished in 2023. I joined an Alphabet Challenge on StoryGraph—not so much to motivate me to read more, but as a decision helper to pick my next read from my TBR shelf. I will start with my physical bookshelf and if I don‘t find a matching letter there, move on to my ebook shelf. And if I still don‘t have a matching letter, I will count my physical books and let a random number generator pick for me. That‘s the plan, anyway. For now the letter S is ticked off!
And besides tracking the origin countries of my read authors, I will also take a note of the book settings and publishing years. I don‘t think StoryGraph does that… The start looks like this:
book location / setting (Location)
Outer Solar System
Enceladus (moon, Saturn) — 1
book published in… (Year)
2020 — 1
Cathy's Reading Bonanza 