Book Review: ‘A Letter to the Luminous Deep’ by Sylvie Cathrall (magical light academia fantasy)

This book has been on my radar since I first saw the cover months and months ago, and yet when I started reading it, I had somehow managed to not realise it was an epistolary novel despite the title… So I won’t let you get any further into my review without knowing what this magical debut is about.

A charming fantasy set in an underwater world with magical academia and a heartwarming penpal romance, perfect for fans of A Marvellous Light and Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other.

Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

A year later, E.'s sister Sophy, and Henerey's brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery of their siblings' disappearances with the letters, sketches and field notes left behind. As they uncover the wondrous love their siblings shared, Sophy and Vyerin learn the key to their disappearance - and what it could mean for life as they know it.

The comparison to Emily Wilde is completely spot on, and for me, it does what I wanted from the first Emily Wilde but didn’t quite get (I will be reading book two at some point and hopefully I get the delightful light academia that I’m looking for).

‘A Letter to the Luminous Deep’ has that suspended, ambiguous time period that could be the 1920s or the 40s, or it could equally be an alternative version of somewhere in the 19th Century. There’s a formality to the correspondence between E and Henerey at first, and again between Sophy and Vyerin, that only dissolves with time and intimacy and sometimes still creeps in at times. It’s charming and sweet, slow and full of that suppressed yearning that I associate with historical novels and classics that are romance (aka Austen).

I’m a big fan of underwater settings, especially when the world is shaped around it, and I’m a bit obsessed with the worldbuilding for ‘A Letter to the Luminous Deep’. Because we’re hearing the entire story through letters and field notes, it’s not until we start to get some excerpts from books shared between the correspondence that it starts to be revealed why most people live on strange floating cities or the one remaining land mass, but even by 50% of the way through the novel, my understanding of what exactly happened was shaky. It was a tad frustrating, but I just chose to suspend my disbelief and try and be a bit more patient. A slow drip of world-building is definitely better than an overwhelming info-dump!

Want to know what else made me happy when reading this book? E and Henerey.

They. Are. The. Sweetest.

I fell in love with their friendship and their burgeoning relationship really quickly, and everything that we learned about them fuelled the mystery of their disappearance and how unlikely it seemed with their personalities. I really didn’t expect the mystery element to be so compelling but it was equal footing with the romance for me which is really unusual. I think that was actually helped by the limited information we were given about the world at the start and I loved watching them unfold the mysteries surrounding them.

One of my favourite things about split narratives, whether dual POV or dual timeline, is watching them interweave and things fall into place on both sides. In this novel in particular, it really felt like the waiting paid off, and it ended up making a lot of sense outside of the necessity of the structure of the novel as we learn about what led up to E and Henerey’s disappearance, and the history of the Deep House and its creator.

I am so glad this book lived up to the gorgeous cover for me and the way that the plot developed has me incredibly excited for book two in ‘The Sunken Archives’ which the end of the book promises will be arriving in 2025!

Sylvie Cathrall’s debut is a magical light academia brimming with charm, romance and a vivid and mysterious world that’s begging to be returned to.

‘A Letter to the Luminous Deep’ by Sylvie Cathrall will be published by Orbit on 25 April 2024. Thank you to Orbit and NetGalley for the review copy.

Written by Sophie