★★★☆☆ Rough draft of Into the Drowning Deep

Rolling in the Deep

Mira Grant

** spoiler alert **

Although I have marked this review as a spoiler, it will not be if you have already read Into the Drowning Deep, because Rolling in the Deep is already spoiled for you. Likewise, if you have read Rolling, Into is spoiled for you. If, like me, you're going to waste your time by reading both books, I would advise you to read Into first, because it is the better of the two books and you might as well read the best book unspoiled.

Why do I say this? Well, let's see. In both books mockumentary company Imagine Entertainment sends a ship full of scientists, entertainers, and crew to hang out at the Mariana Trench and look for mermaids. In both books, they indeed find mermaid-like animals. The mermaids are voracious fast-moving things with mouths full of scary teeth that like to bite human faces off. In both cases the mermaid-things come aboard and swarm the ship, killing humans and taking corpses back underwater with them. And each book ends with the revelation that the mermaid species is sexually dimorphic -- the swimmy face-bitey version is the male, and the female is a gigantic bioluminescent monster that the males bring food to. (This idea is based on anglerfish sexual dimorphism, but I believe McGuire has the trophic relationship backward. In anglerfish species where only one sex feeds, it is the giant female. The males are parasites on her.) The only significant plot difference is that everyone dies in Rolling, but there are survivors in Into.

Emphasizing the similarity, both books have deaf characters: the first mate in Rolling and a pair of twin sister scientists in Into. While I applaud the deaf representation, it is weird that it shows up in these two books and not elsewhere in McGuire's writings. I have read over 200 books and stories by McGuire. If I remember correctly (please correct me if I have forgotten some), there are exactly two with deaf characters: Rolling in the Deep and Into the Drowning Deep. The association between deaf representation and "Deep" books is significant at P <0.0001 (Fisher's exact test, two-tailed).

Rolling is much the shorter of the two books: a novella compared to Into, which is a full-length novel. Rolling definitely feels sketchy. The cast of characters is large, but there is not time to get to know them. Even towards the end of the book, when I read a name I had trouble remembering who it was.

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