An admission: I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump. It’s been a frustrating few years.
As much as I want to say that I don’t know what brought it about, I’m pretty sure the reasons are clear as day. I got busy with Elision and school. I got sad. Ridiculous as it sounds, I got an iPad—which, let’s be honest, did kind of play a major role in fucking up my attention span.
The point is, I’ve always been a book person. But for quite a while I was only ever able to devour and love books in theory, and the thought of actually getting through them without skimming and finishing them became a far off improbability. I had a handful of starts and stops, and then I just stopped kidding myself altogether.
This week I finished Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue.
And now, after what feels like a lifetime of not being able to write about what I’ve been reading, here’s me gushing about it.
Three years ago, the world was ending. At least, the students of Gracetown High, inspired by Ray Bradbury, were pretending it was. Rachel was spending her last night in town. She was leaving a love letter in her best friend Henry’s favorite book and waiting for him to call.
But that’s all in the past. Before Henry broke her heart and she stopped responding to his letters. Before she failed Year 12. Before she lost her brother Cal to the sea and everything she’s ever known stopped making sense.
Almost a year after Cal’s death, Rachel moves back to Gracetown to live with her aunt and work at Howling Books, the secondhand bookshop owned by Henry’s family, even though she’d rather be anywhere else. Henry is there all the time. He works there. He lives there. And these days all he does is mope because his girlfriend dumped him and he just voted to sell the bookstore, even though he loves it, because he knows it’s the practical choice.
Neither of them is sure about the future. But their days at the bookstore, with the written and unwritten histories that surround them, see them begin to reconnect and find hope—on dog-eared pages and beyond.
I barely remember how I found out about this, but I knew I’d adore it immediately. Not only because I had read the author’s Graffiti Moon a few years ago, but also because the blurb promised me everything I’ve ever loved reading about—unrequited crushes on friends you’ve known forever; estrangement from said friends that only adds to the tension; miscommunication and grand, anguished declarations of affection; grief; and bargain bookstores—thrown together into one love story. And before you mistake me for a sap (which I am), it says “a love story” right there on the cover. It was such a simple but unprecedented premise, I couldn’t help but fall for it.
So, it might’ve taken me more than a couple of days to finish this and I’m still not back to my glory days, but I think it’s finally taken me back on a real literature kick again. I think I just needed to get to a healthier mental state for it. I was patient with the book and I held back the urge to skim far ahead and check the last page (bad habit) because I was super invested and glad to be experiencing it. Also, it’s about people and their relationship/s with books, so I couldn’t have chosen a better comeback pick!
That said, it felt very good to immerse myself in its universe. The novel, told from both Rachel’s and Henry’s perspectives, takes place in a small Australian town in the summer. However, there are also a few scenes on the beach because, among other reasons, Rachel’s home away from Gracetown is located right by the ocean. Personally, I’ve been away from the water for quite some time, and it was fun to live vicariously through and seemingly within the nice little fictional world Cath Crowley has built. You can practically breathe in the briny air and feel the splash of the waves.
Of course, most of the plot unfolds in and around Howling Books. Again, I loved the idea (and execution) of a secondhand bookshop as a setting. In one of Henry’s chapters, he says that the appeal of secondhand books comes from the way they can be full of mysteries, and I completely get what he means. When I buy previously owned books, especially copies that have been around as far back as the 1960s or even the 1940s, I always get to thinking a lot about all the sediments of past lives they carry with them. Who were the owners, to whom my life is now weirdly bound in the smallest yet most amazing way? What became of them, and were they anything like me? How far have these books traveled, and what sorts of events did they get to watch unfold?
Sometimes they’d leave clues. A personal bookmark, notes and highlighted quotes right on the pages, inscriptions on the title page that read To Katie, on your graduation. Love, Dad. (Katie, you heartless bitch, throwing away a present and a perfectly good book! Love, Fiel) Which brings us to the Letter Library, Howling Books’s claim to fame. It’s an entire section of books that aren’t for sale; instead, customers are invited to write on them and leave notes in them. It’s such a romantic notion, people leaving a mark in books that have left a mark in them. Samples from the Letter Library are interspersed between chapters, and they're mostly letters exchanged between the characters that are very telling of character and relationship development. It’s a charming and actually useful touch to the narrative.
Don’t laugh, but sometimes I’d forget that Rachel and Henry were fictional. They were painfully real, flawed people with distinct voices and ways of looking at life—she from a scientific viewpoint and he with a more literary take. I have nothing but love for Rachel, who hides her sadness in deadpan snark and a lot of introspection, and is just effortlessly cool, insightful, and level-headed. She still wants to dive and swim across the world despite her newly conflicted feelings about large bodies of water. She’s too sensible to believe in ghosts or time travel or transmigration, but she’s still the kind of person who wants to believe, anyway. Henry, on the other hand...man, I don’t know if I want to throw a book at him or write poetry about him. He makes some truly questionable and immature decisions and pines over a girl who clearly doesn’t deserve him, but at the end of the day he’s a kind, intelligent boy who genuinely cares about the people in his life, lives for literature and the shop, and is prone to goofy self-deprecation.
The minor characters are all very rich and endearing, and they all have their own unique way of loving books, but I particularly grew fond of George, Henry’s sister. She gets shit for being a “freak” at school and has turned to a moody, tough-girl, fuck-off exterior as a defense mechanism, but she’s really a softie who loves reading science fiction with her cat and isn’t afraid of being herself in general. There’s a beautiful side plot involving her and an anonymous pen pal/secret admirer that just took my breath away.
The novel wears its subtitle “a love story” with a quiet confidence that, holy shit, delivers. Rachel has loved Henry like that for years, and she leaves his life feeling jilted because she thinks he’s ignored her bold, fuck-it attempt at making a move, finally. Henry, on the other hand, has no idea why Rachel ended their friendship and forgot all about him—all he knows is that it hurt and that she’s come back “rude and gorgeous.” Three years of distance and change is a long time. Rachel returns feeling like she’s gotten over Henry, and Henry’s as clueless as ever, so they both get to experience the deliciously slow process, built up through a series of swoon-inducing moments, of realizing that they’re actually (still) in love (all along).
There’s a kind of warm and fuzzy unresolved sexual tension going on between them, amplified by interactions that range from funny to stilted to pining to intimate. Part of it’s because they’re actually great at being friends; they know everything about each other. And yet, in some ways, they don’t. And their discoveries are sweet and tender and promising. It’s all in the details. For example, Henry absentmindedly reaches out to touch Rachel’s bathing suit strap when he notices it peeking out from under her dress. It never becomes super explicit, but the writing more than makes up for it. See:
‘You’re very neat,’ Henry says, looking at my handwriting, and it feels like he’s said something sexy.
‘You’re very messy,’ I say.
‘And yet, I’m the one who passed Year 12,’ he says.
‘You’re very annoying,’ I say, smiling at him.
‘You’re very sexy,’ he says, like it just came out and he had no control over it.
‘So are you,’ I say.
‘It’s not the way I’m usually described,’ he says.
‘Tonight feels sort of unusual,’ I say.
I mean...?! See also: “You owe me an apocalypse,” falling asleep together right inside the bookstore reading T.S. Eliot, “You smell of apples.” / “Don’t smell me, Henry,” unbuttoning someone slowly, etc.
This is also a novel of grief, and it’s handled in a way that poignantly captures what real grief feels like. Sometimes it’s like it’s not there, but it’s ever-present, a current surging even when you don’t sense it. Sometimes you just pretend it isn’t. Rachel’s lament that her brother’s life ended up as a set of boxes collecting his abandoned belongings is soul-crushing, but through her eyes, we get to know Cal, and mourn him, and keep him alive.
The way Cath Crowley ties sentences together is just something else. So wonderful. Sometimes I get too wrapped up to highlight my favorite passages, but with Words in Deep Blue I couldn’t help it—the lines and paragraphs are so pretty or painful or funny or full of wisdom or #relatable or real or all of the above that I needed to remember them and keep them. There’s not a lot of flourish to them, very tell-it-like-it-is, but they sound incredibly nice. I also love that she seamlessly added a lot of references to literature and the theories of time and explored themes of family, gender and sex positivity, and diversity.
I cried. I mean, obviously, I cried. I cried at the letters and the way some of it turned out because all of these characters are facing many different kinds of loss and the effects of growing up or growing older. But, again, there’s a lot of hope and tomorrows to go around, and it brings people together. It’s a brighter kind of realism that reminded me of Sing Street. Life’s shit, but you have to swim against the tide or with it, whatever, something like that.
I don’t think I’d ever had the pleasure of being able to read the exact book that my sensibilities were calling for at a specific point in my life, until Words in Deep Blue came around. It was so lovely I didn’t want it to end. I almost want to un-read it just so I can experience it all again for the first time. It was completely in sync with me and it’s both unfair and perfect that there will never be anything like it. I’m certain that it will remain with me the way the books in the Letter Library stay with the people who’ve written in them—the way only the best books can and do.
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