In brief: Eliza Mirk is the creator of the hit webcomic Monstrous Sea. She’s also a misfit in her school and family. She’s good with her double life, no really. But then she meets Wallace, who writes fic for her comic, and balancing everything starts to get hard.
Thoughts: At this point, I’d like to think I’m a connoisseur of fannish YA and this, folks, is one of the best I’ve read. It’s certainly the one that gets closest to how creativity feels, how online popularity feels especially in the face of brickspace loneliness, and also how depression and low self-esteem feel. (I identified with Eliza a lot.) Also, in terms of fictional fandoms, Monstrous Sea is a pretty cool one and I loved that it was excerpted along with its art.
This isn’t strictly a story about fandom, though, or about a girl stretched to her limit, though that’s a large and lovely part of it and the way the fandom feels, and its fans, struck me as very real. The rest of the story, the meat of it, is about family expectations and how those can go wrong, and about hope and courage and finding solace in art and in people, and again, that all felt real and truthful even if certain aspects of, say, Eliza’s family felt over the top. I admired the way Zappia captured Eliza’s life in all its messy, spiky glory and the way she did the standard YA coming-of-age differently.
For all that I’m waxing poetic about the plot and the themes, though, I think character is where Zappia really shines. She creates flawed, complex people and lets you in on their flaws without making that obvious. Her secondary characters (Eliza’s family, Wallace’s friends) have personalities that don’t necessarily feel deep but are, or that lie outside what you’d expect from the genre. Everyone has a voice and Monstrous Sea is exactly the sort of story Eliza would be telling.
I do think the cover blurb mis-sold the book, though. It made it sound faster and more dramatic than it was, like the Big Moment came closer to the beginning and the tension in the story was to do with that, when really the tension comes from other sources and the Moment, while sudden, is foreshadowed or at least built up to, and it’s really a story about Eliza discovering who she really is and what she wants out of life, and gaining the courage to be herself, and that’s a slow thing, spurred as much by her friendship with Wallace (who is a sweetheart) as the dramatic fandom stuff. It’s exactly the sort of leisurely, meandering, structured mess that I love in YA contemporaries.
So yeah, this absolutely hit me in the feels, if people are still saying that. Eliza’s highs were my highs and her lows meant sympathy, indignation, and … not tears, but it was close. It’s a poignant, wonderful read in a lot of ways, and not one I think should be limited to teens. There’s a whole subplot about parents and their expectations that I think a lot of adults could benefit from thinking about too, especially if they have or want children. And then, of course, there are the creative, geeky adults who were creative, geeky teens…
Anyway, the only reason I’m not rating this higher is that this didn’t blow me out of the water. It was simply very, very good.
To bear in mind: Deals pretty strongly with mental health issues, up to and including suicide, but also deals with therapy and medication. Also contains fandom dog-piling, people with very specific ideas about physical health, and people who think fine arts and the humanities aren’t worthwhile.
