Only the Ocean has a really interesting premise. However the writing style was infuriating and the lack of commas took away any enjoyment for me.

This is a quick read (I read it in one sitting while I was organising my shelves) but that's one of it's best features. The story doesn't really stand out, it has a F/F romance but it isn't really a surprise and it just seems to be a collection of things happening to them until suddenly everything is fine and they realise they love each other and are now a family.

It does a good job at trying to convey the mind set of the characters and it shows in the difference of how they speak which I found okay and interesting but it gets old fast.

"Nothing was too much for a girl with nothing to lose"

* *
2 / 5

I loved the premise of two girls falling in love in a boat floating on the ocean as the world drowns around them. Unfortunately I found the writing style so incredibly aggravating that it made it really hard for me to enjoy the great aspects about Only the Ocean: fast plot, interesting universe, and cool main character.

Kel Crow belongs to a family of drug dealers in a world where the poor dwell in the swamps of a waterlogged world and the rich literally live in high towers. In return for enough money for her to escape her abusive father, Kel agrees to board a boat and kidnap a rich tower girl, Rose, for ransom. She has her baby in tow, which was definitely a completely unique YA plot point for me: I've never read a YA fantasy novel where the main character has a kid. Unfortunately for Kel, her kidnapping doesn't go quite to plan and her and Rose end up floating on a boat in the ocean.

I'm going to start off with the things I liked about Only the Ocean. I liked how the book wasn't overly length. It kept the plot moving and rolling with the punches. A lot of action happened. The universe itself was intriguing; with towers for the rich, guns, pirates, and too much water, the book felt futuristic and interesting. Lastly, Kel was a unique character with a strong accent that grew on me throughout the book.

Unfortunately, the writing style of the book was so incredibly aggravating and difficult to read. There were virtually no commas, every sentence was overrun with metaphors, and I had to read some paragraphs several times for them to make sense. It didn't have any kind of flow. Here is a couple of examples:

"Kel pulled at what clothes were still holding to hide corners of skin from the bang-bang rain, but no matter what she did the salt-soak still bit biddy bites from her flesh"

"Its orb was so big and fleshy it filled the dark with muscular bounce and Kel sat up to wash herself clean with midnight light"

Everything was so overly described that I felt completely emotionally disconnected from the plot and the characters. I didn't feel like I knew Rose at all. Only the Ocean definitely had some great qualities, but I did not get along with the writing at all.

My thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of Only the Ocean

Ahh this book... This book left me with that sweet post-book bliss that only the very best story manage to provide. The (queer) (*squeals*) romance, and surprisingly dark character background (not to mention an ending that made me bawl) helped to make this book memorable and unique.

I, like many of the other reviewers most admit that I found the writing style to be something of a challenge early into the story. However, I found that once I delved into the book for a significant period at a time, the writing would not only begin to make sense but begin to really contribute to my understanding of the novel. Only the Ocean's writing was its own language, and as the story progressed, I became more fluent.

The setting, too, was hard to decipher, and I never managed to settle on where exactly it was set (both location and time wise). In the end, however, it did't really impact the story; just my curiosity.

A great novel with a ship-worthy (puns) couple and quirky plot. A definite 4.5 stars!

I received an eArc of Only the Ocean in return for an honest review.

Unfortunately I'm not able to review this book as (comparing with the preview version on Amazon, at least) the formatting for Kindle seems to be wrong - there are random large gaps between words, some words are split in the middle, and the paragraphs sometimes jump strangely. I'd rather not spoil my enjoyment of it, so I'll buy a copy instead. Thank you for the ARC anyway!

I've held off on writing this review for as long as I can, in the hope that my opinion will change... but nah. The writing style was actually painful.

An interesting concept but I struggled with the writing style and that really impacted on my enjoyment of this book. Kel Crow is fifteen , living in a swamp with her family, and the victim of abuse . Her only dream is to flee to America so that she can have an operation on her heart, and in order to make that happen she must kidnap Rose, the daughter of an arms dealer, and trade her for drugs which will fund her travels. In the strange dystopian future of the world presented in this book, riots have broken out, the rich live in the safety of towers while the rest of the population literally struggle in the mud and filth.
Despite the strange and strained circumstances, Rose and Kel grow to care for each other, and rely on each other for survival in some very harsh conditions.
While the premise of the book was interesting, as I mentioned the struggle with the writing style made this book less enjoyable for me. The author has chosen to use minimal punctuation, resulting in long run on sentences which are difficult to read fluidly.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

I found this extremely difficult to read due to the writing style. I’m sure to some it will be wonderfully lyrical but unfortunately I just couldn’t gel with it. The prose are overly descriptive and because of this I found myself distancing myself from the characters. I had no emotional connections with anyone.

The plot itself, if you can wade through the writing, is pretty good. It’s quite a short book, so it needs to be succinct and fast paced, and the story is creative. I love dystopian novels, and even if they all tend to follow the same patterns, I usually find them entertaining.

I just wish I could have got on with the writing, because this was a struggle.

I admit I've been in a reading slump lately and that may have a lot to do with the fact that I couldn't keep reading this. I got bored and confused. The sentences didn't really make any sense with the lack of commas, and even though this is an arc I think the commas were purposely missing.
I'm also not really a fan of this type of writing so it just didn't get to me.
Maybe when I'm out of the slump I'll give it another try but for now, I really want to find something that gets me going from the start instead of me trying to keep going without wanting to.

This is one of those books that was advertised on Netgalley as 'Teens and YA', but kept popping up on my Twitter feed as having queer rep. So not knowing much about it or about the author, I requested the book and was approved, thinking that the concept sounded fascinating. But sadly, the book didn't really live up to my expectations.

Kel Crow is the book's main character, and the whole story is told from her perspective. She's from the wrong side of the tracks, a member of a family with a reputation for being ruthless and deeply involved in illegal activities. She also has a heart defect, and without surgery (unavailable to her in her current situation), she could die at any moment. Kel's tough and aggressive, partly because that's how she's been brought up to be, and partly because that's the only why she can get by in the world. She's resourceful too, but not always the best at thinking through the full consequences of her actions.

Regarding characterisation, I felt like I knew and understood Kel and her motivations. However, I didn't feel connected to any of the other characters, and particularly with Rose, I think that was a huge issue in the book. Because all we get of her is from her interactions with Kel, and much of that is coloured by Kel's perceptions and assumptions about her, it's hard to see her as her own person with her own agency, rather than just a character who exists to force Kel to go on a journey. And if I hadn't known that there was queer rep, I think I would have been surprised when it was explicitly stated, as for me, the relationship didn't feel like it was developing that way.

I found a lot of the story quite difficult to follow. Carthew uses dialect for Kel and various other characters, which I'm not always fond of, and Kel herself has quite unusual internal dialogue patterns. Combined with some formatting choices that could be to do with the specific e-ARC copy I read or could be part of the finished version, overall I struggled both to understand what exactly was being said, and what was happening in terms of the plot. I was definitely interested in what was happening, but I felt like the pacing didn't quite work for me, so some sections seemed to be quite long for what was going on it them, whilst others felt too short and lacking in detail.

The one aspect of the book I really loved was the setting. It's in the UK, which is a great place to start, and then it's in Cornwall, and off the coast there, which is an area of the country I think should be way more prevalent in literature (outside of the cozy mystery/women's fiction type books set in some quaint country cottage). And of course, the sea itself plays a huge role in the story, and is beautifully imagined. I thought the sense of place was incredibly vividly described throughout, and the whole book felt quite cinematic in that respect.

This was definitely not the read I was expecting it to be. Though I loved the setting and the vivid descriptions, the actual storyline didn't make all that much sense to me, and I didn't feel any connection to the characters. Sadly, this isn't a book I'd recommend, though I'd be interested in checking out other books by this author to see what the rest of her writing is like.

In a dystopian world filled with water, people have little chance of living a good life. Kel Crow, just fifteen, wants to escape the life she's been living with her family. And there's a plan involved. The pan was easy: kidnap the girl from the ship, and swap her in order to gain passage to America and start a new life. But when things don't go as planned, Kel will see a very different outcome to her life..

Only the Ocean is a book with a very unique concept. Kel is undoubtedly a very strong-willed and resourceful individual, and her story is one of resilience and courage. This is certainly a good fit for young adults and teenagers. I only have one objection: the writing. It was actually very bad at the beginning (no commas, lack of necessary punctuation, bad writing), which reduced the readability and made reading an unpleasant experience. However, it significantly improved after the first twenty pages or so. I sincerely hope this happened because it is an ARC, which is why I didn't rate lower; if not, however, and if this is its final form, then I would strongly suggest re-editing the first chapters, as the writing style actually took some of the pleasure of the story away.

Overall a very good concept, with a really interesting protagonist.

[this review will be up on my blog, acquadimore.wordpress.com, on 09/22/2018]

Only the Ocean is an interesting experiment of how it would feel to read a perfectly normal book if you took 90% of the commas out.
As it turns out, it's unreadable - long run-on sentences just don't flow well - and also pretty confusing at times.
I know I read an ARC and ARCs aren't always edited, but I think the lack of commas was intentional (a stylistic choice, maybe, but one I don't really understand the purpose of) because I can't believe so many of them would just... not be there.
I decided to DNF when I got to the first dialogues, because I understood the writing wasn't going to get any better and because this book also does another thing I do not like - it writes the accents in the dialogue.
The idea of a LGBTQ book set in a water-logged world whose protagonist is a girl with a heart defect sounded really interesting, but I'm not continuing this.