Secrets So Deep

'Secrets So Deep' is a fantastical YA mystery/horror book by Ginny Myers Sain about a girl called Avril. From the back of the book, we know that her mother died 12 years ago and that it was said to be a drowning, and we also know, from the first few pages, that Avril is very drawn to the sea. Possibly something that her mother was also experiencing. We learn about three other characters as well, although I cannot tell how many of them are actually going to have major parts in the stories. These characters are Lex, Val, and Jude and it does certainly seem like at least Jude is going to be there later in the story, and Lex seems like he has a crush on Jude so he could be there as well. With Val, Avril had forgotten her name at first and thought she was called Viv instead, which doesn't bode well for their potential friendship.

The way she describes the water, like a womb, and how she at one point doesn't know whether she is supposed to swim out into the ocean or back to shore, makes it seem like she is from the ocean like it birthed her. Or like her mother is still active in the ocean and has now combined into one organism with it. This place is called whisper cove and the myth is that the sea called to women years ago and then took their babies with them and all drowned. Only, if we follow that it comes with us having to suspect that this is the incident that took Avril's mother from her, or something very similar to this is the cause. I wouldn't be suggesting things like this if it wasn't a fantasy story, and I also wouldn't be suggesting that when Avril said that she died on the beach in the exact spot that they were in now, in her head not to her friends, that she meant it literally as I would always usually assume metaphorically. It being something like her mother dying killed the old her or something like that, but since it is a story that includes fantasy I am more inclined to go with her actual wording.

Lex, Jude, Avril and Val are all actors and right now they are trying to gain experience by joining a play. Having a play alongside everything, where it symbolises certain motions in the story or foreshadows certain events, is a great way to convey those things without it seeming too weird.

The person who wrote the play that Avril and the rest are playing in is called Willa Culver, and she was someone who was friends with Avril's mother before she died, and it even seems like the play that she wrote is about somewhat about her mother, although the leads name is Eden and it is like Avril automatically knows that her mother and Eden are linked because she not only provides the best performance, that is extremely intuitive, but she also told, together with all the auditioners, to just start moving to one of the pieces of music that goes with the play and when she does it triggers Willa to realise that Avril used to be known as April and is Willa's daughter. That night Avril ends up seeing someone who looks like her mother at night, although they end up disappearing when she blinks. The next day is when Willa talks to Avril a lot more and tells her about her mother, and her memories start to come back as she remembers Glory, the receptionist she is working with.

Avril does end up getting the leading role, but since one of the actors had to drop out the male lead that is playing opposite her is going to be Cole, which is obviously a way for them to get closer, but also a way to bring drama throughout all parts of the book as he is going to be involved in the two parts we are supposed to explore. It definitely does look like the right two choices as those two seem the understand the story, and the hidden meanings behind the relationships much more than the rest of the cast, which is very important to getting those small undertones in the scene that are usually very implicit.

Everything is starting to come together to push Avril down the same path that her mother was forced down, as not only does she have hallucinations of herself drowning in a bathroom (which she finds herself completely find, just really cold, but, after hearing the same foghorn noise and voices, she finds herself knee-deep in the ocean, unsure of how she got there. It is like the ocean is slowly bringing her closer to her death, or she's got some crazy sleepwalking condition that makes her unconscious want to end her own life.

Avril does get some things from Glory that her mother used to own, including a notebook and a sweater. The notebook has many things in it, but the one that stands out the most to Avril is the mention of having to break something off with someone initialled B.C. and the only person she knows called B.C. on the whole island is Willa's husband Brody Culver. This causes her to assume that her mother was having an affair with Willa's husband, although this isn't set in stone by any means.

Rather than the fog and ocean seeming like actual fantasy things they seem, at least to me, more like representations of grief and how while you're learning, or trying to get through all the horrible things you've repressed, you are probably going to start falling as well, and it is about how well you deal with that which lets you get to a better and more accepting place grief wise. It seems like all Avril's memories come at the same time as the voices, sleepwalking and visions continue, or increase. Rather than looking at the sea and fog as something real, looking at it from the perspective that the fog is a representative of the detachment some people feel when something bad happens in their lives, and the call of the sea is literally the call to death. It is what the official police report reported Avril's mother's death as, a suicide.

The relationship between Avril and Cole isn't really something that held my interest much at all. It wasn't something that I found particularly interesting or something that I wanted to spend more brain power contemplating or even remembering. It doesn't really feel like they have much of a connection, at least romantically, as it seems more superficial and surface level, a first teen love, rather than something more serious. This does cause the book to move much more slowly for me, as it is one of the three main plot points, not including her looking into her mother's death, as her following her dreams to be an actress. It really isn't a good thing when one of the main things you're pushing isn't the most interesting, but it wasn't badly put together either though, which means it doesn't bring it down too low, compared to what it would have got if I had noticed that it was not only boring but also really badly written in every way.

The story has been pretty boring and basic so far and has not really included much, only one of two scenes, that have actually gripped me, until this point, where they are enacting the scene where Eden drowns. This brings back memories of the day that her mother died, and putting it together with comments that Val made, (about how Brody is known for getting too close to the female cast members) and the fact that she knows that Cole was there too, she is able to conclude that what happened to her mother wasn't an accident at all and that Brody Culver killed her and tried to kill Avril too. It is a massively sharp turn from the mysterious fog, grief and sleepwalking that we were going through before, and is now something much more real as it is about someone murdering someone else which is something that happens all the time in real life.

But instead of trusting her first instinct, I am leaning more towards the person who killed Nicole Willa, and that it had something to do with the play that she won her award for creating. Something about her doesn't seem right, and she does seem like the kind of person who would say, 'If I can't have you, no one can' and would actually follow through with that. Even Cole was insistent that his father was too much of a coward to act upon cheating on Willa, saying that his mother was too ruthless and would cut him off straight away and basically destroy him if she even found out that he did that.

Someone, since she first arrived on the island, has been leaving lavender around where Avril goes. I didn't give it much thought, but when Cole pointed out that George grows it by his house, and with how creepy he had been acting towards her I started to suspect that he was involved instead of either Brody or Willa. But when he mentioned, cluelessly, that Glory was getting him to get her lavender and that it had been her the whole time it started to change my perspective to maybe assume that she was the one who killed Avril's mother and tried to kill Avril.

But then there is also the other point that they have been emphasising recently how fickle human memory is, and how you can never fully trust your memory I am also considering the possibility that no one was murdered and that since this is classed in the fantasy genre, that there actually is more than meets the eye to this situation, and that it is something that we have never seen before, or would expect to see in a normal human world.

The only thing stopping this narrative is that Glory was in love with Nicole, and Nicole broke up with her to leave the place, meaning she wasn't having an affair with Brody, she was with Glory. This explains one part of the memory, hiding beneath the picnic table and covering her ears because of the fighting, but not the other part, where she remembers someone else being at the cliff when her mother was thrown off, and she herself was thrown off. There is also the mystery of Cole's trauma, past that he is able to hear the sea and thinks that the sea is calling to him, as that doesn't explain what happened and why he had to 'go away' for a while.

Oh yeah, and after this happens Glory also kills herself, which is something that I kind of expected based on her weird reactions to things. Such as planting lavender everywhere because she thinks that it might be something that will jog Avril's memories about her mother. It is actually just really creepy though, and not something that an adult should be continuing to do when faced with a child, or really, with anyone. There is also the part where Avril realises what B.C. means and that it has nothing to do with Brody Culver, and has everything to do with the play that Avril is acting in right at this moment. Her mother was the one who wrote it, although it had a different name, and yes, my earlier statement about thinking that it was Willa was sort of correct. Kind of. Glory was the actual person who pushed Nicole over the cliff, but Willa witnessed it all and was the other person there that Avril had memories of but couldn't quite place. Glory, after finding out that Willa knew what she did, told Willa, or moreso offered her the play that allowed Willa to become famous in exchange for her silence on the incident. Since she is so business-focused, and with how ruthless Cole described her as this doesn't come as much of a surprise, but seeing her cold description while her house is burning down, not caring that Avril now knows the whole story of how her mother died and that she refused to get justice for someone that she claimed to love and cherish.

The ending sequence of this book is much too rushed, from what I can see thus far, and it would have been a lot nicer if it was spread out over the whole book instead of all the interesting things happening at the end. It is perfectly fine for that to happen, but when it completely twists the direction of this book and draws so much attention away from the other plot points it makes it hard to give it anything but criticism. It is also why, although it made sense that Willa was a horrible person, and it definitely had been hinted at before in a way that makes sense when you look at it now but could have meant many other things before the actual reveal, I still didn't like how it was done. It needed something more to push it over the edge, something more to do with Willa because her obsession with 'becoming' seemed very shallow to me, and it wasn't something that I assumed was ever going to lead her to not protecting her best friend, or trying to kill her best friend's child, or even trying to kill her own son at the end, which she almost succeeds in doing, accidentally, but Cole survives while Willa dies. There also wasn't a proper epilogue and for some books that definitely works, but for this one it definitely didn't work.

I didn't really like this book, although it was well-written, it did feel like there were stakes and I was looking forward to the reveal, it was a letdown, and it moved much too slowly to keep me constantly interested. After Cole 'died' I didn't really care and was completely content with that being the ending. In other books that I have rated higher in the past that would have made me sad for a long time, but this one didn't have the power to do anything similar at all, which is really disappointing as a murder mystery where your mother's old best friend is the killer, (and with this book being listed as a horror) there was so much more potential in the idea, but it wasn't executed in a way that I would say is sufficient.

Overall, I wouldn't really recommend this book, as although well written, it is missing a lot of fundamental pieces, such as good pacing, the ability to gain emotional investment from the audience, and the characters felt like one-dimensional, or two-dimensional cliches, which can work but when every character feels like that it gets boring fast. There were also the useless two friends, those being Val and Jude, and although I liked them as characters, for the brief period that we were introduced to them, I think that they didn't get enough screen time to justify their existence. And no, that isn't a Twitter insult, it is just that the author created a group of five, including the main character and yet only three of them felt like they were needed, the others felt like filler to add some more dimensions to the main characters, which, in turn, felt really superficial.

4/10