A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall: Review by Colleen Mondor
A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Sylvie Cathrall (Orbit 978-0-316-56553-0, $18.99, 352pp, tp) April 2024. Cover by Raxenne Maniquiz.
Sylvie Cathrall starts off her Sunken Archives series with the charming epistolary novel A Letter to the Luminous Deep. Set on a watery planet long after a catastrophic event that dramatically impacted the landscape, Luminous Deep is a romance and mystery spiced with some eye-rolling family moments that gently takes readers along as it builds to a cliffhanger ending. If you are a fan of a quirky sibling relationships, divinely described parlors and libraries, and the lost art of letter writing (or its modern form, ‘‘automated post missives’’), then this is the novel (and series) you have been waiting for. Get yourself a cup of cocoa, settle in, and let Cathrall’s worldbuilding take you away.
Erudition ‘‘E’’ Cidnosin lives in Deep House, the undersea architectural marvel designed by her mother, where she and her brother and sister grew up. Her siblings have both become Scholars, her sister exploring the great ocean depths and her brother as a somewhat avant-garde artist. E suffers from extreme anxiety and is largely agoraphobic, rarely leaving the house. Sophie and Arvist come and go, but all of them stay in communication with each other. Their mother died years before and their grief-stricken father has left the world behind to drift on a boat far out at sea. (Apparently not an uncommon choice for certain Scholars.) Then, one day, E sees an odd fish and makes a drawing and sends it along with an inquisitive letter to a scholar of such creatures, Henerey Clel. He responds, she responds, and you know where this is going. But along the way toward the love story there are Sophie’s adventures, Arvist’s artsy excitements, their mother’s slowly uncovered secrets and, overshadowing everything else, the knowledge early on that in the present E and Henerey are missing following a terrible accident. Two timelines move along with E and Henerey exchanging letters a year earlier and later, Sophie and Henerey’s brother Vyerin trying to understand what happened. Everyone is interested in what everyone is doing and knows and can figure out, and perhaps the most impressive thing about A Letter to the Luminous Deep is that Cathrall manages to juggle so many different characters on different quests who converge because of their relationships (romantic, sibling, and friend), at the same time that massive revelations become known about the planet and its history and maybe an entire group of beings that are using undersea doors to travel possibly, maybe, across dimensions.
A Letter to the Luminous Sea is Cathrall’s debut, and she has a lot going on here; clearly this story has been percolating in her brain for a long time. It took me a moment to get into the rhythm of the exchanges, which include not just letters but journal excerpts and highlights from books and poetry, but between the questions about Deep House, Sophie’s discoveries down deep, whatever Artist is hiding (including his fiancé) and everything their mother knew but never told them, there is plenty to propel the plot. Some smaller characters do get lost a bit in all this, and sometimes others seem to appear merely to force the main group to ask questions but still, Jane Austen fans who don’t mind some science fiction with their wit, will love what Cathrall is doing here. I will confess that the sudden science fiction leap was a bit abrupt for me, but I imagine the second book will smooth out some of those questions and bring things more into focus. Mostly, this title is a trip for those who like their bigger plots to be interspersed with crushes and confusions and the pedantic habits of academia (which are the same everywhere). Also, it’s hard not to fall for E and Henerey, who find what they have long been looking for in each other.
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This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.
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