The Descent of the Drowned

The Descent of the Drowned is a 2021 fantasy novel by Ana Lal Din. It’s the first novel in the series of the same name and was the author’s debut. It was released in March 2021 and published by White Tigress Press.

She is bound to serve. He is meant to kill. Survival is their prison. Choice is their weapon. As the sacred slave of a goddess, Roma is of a lower caste that serves patrons to sustain the balance between gods and men. What she wants is her freedom, but deserters are hunted and hanged, and Roma only knows how to survive in her village where women are vessels without a voice. When her younger brother is condemned to the same wretched fate as hers, Roma must choose between silence and rebellion. Leviathan is the bastard son of an immortal tyrant. Raised in a military city where everyone knows of his blood relation to the persecuted clans, Leviathan is considered casteless. Lowest of the low. Graduating as one of the deadliest soldiers, he executes in his father’s name, displaying his worth. When he faces judgement from his mother’s people—the clans—Leviathan must confront his demons and forge his own path, if he ever hopes to reclaim his soul. But in the struggle to protect the people they love and rebuild their identities, Roma’s and Leviathan’s destinies interlock as the tyrant hunts an ancient treasure that will doom humankind should it come into his possession—a living treasure to which Roma and Leviathan are the ultimate key.

Before I get into my review, this novel does deal with some heavy and difficult subject matter. The trigger warnings for this book include: sexual assault, self-harm, suicide, explicit violence, addiction, transphobia and human trafficking. This is important to mention not only because they occur within the book, but also because the author has stated that she wanted to spread awareness about these issues.

If you like morally grey characters, this would be a great book for you. Both Roma and Leviathan are incredibly flawed, morally complex individuals, but in different ways. Roma has been assigned a fate she doesn’t want and a great deal of her conflict is between herself and the role in society she’s been given. She wants to escape, but knows trying would lead to more pain. She’s a strong character, but doesn’t fall into the “strong female character” trope. Something that I appreciated about her character is that her complexity and rebellion against society didn’t come from nothing, but was the result of events in her past. There were distinct reasons behind her distrust and anger towards those around her. Leviathan is more outwardly flawed, being a man at war with the two sides of himself. He can be the son his father wants, or do right by his mother’s people, but not both. He’s also the more outwardly morally ambiguous, due to taking a more active role in certain events.

The setting of this novel is a colonized Indo-Persian world and was inspired by pre-Islamic Arabian mythology. I liked the world of this story, but I didn’t completely feel immersed within it. It was evident to me that the author was pulling inspiration from very rich and deep cultures. The complexity of the society was clear from the first page, but could be somewhat hard to grasp and follow. The inspiration and detail wasn’t woven into the story as seamlessly as she probably intended. A great deal of the world-building feels like info-dumping to someone not familiar with Indo-Persian cultures as a result. Creating a world and exploring cultures within that world isn’t an easy task, but once I found my footing while reading and got a handle of the world, I was able to appreciate what the author was trying to do with the world. The world of this book is an instance where I enjoyed the world and found it to be compelling, but the execution of introducing the world to readers fell a bit flat.

I enjoyed the plot of this book, though it was hard to follow at times. The novel is more character-driven than plot-driven, for the first half of the book. There’s scene after scene of things happening to Roma or encounters Leviathan has with other characters. A few of these scenes are important, but some of them don’t seem to have a purpose. While having a character-driven story is perfectly fine, once you get into the second half of the story, events start happening much faster as the plot takes hold and I found myself wondering if I had missed something substantial in the first half. I hadn’t. The blurb references events that don’t happen until more than halfway through the book, however, which made me think I kept missing things. I liked the plot itself, but I wish it had been given more time to breathe and develop. It wasn’t clear until pretty far into the book what the main conflict was or even how Roma and Leviathan’s storylines were going to intersect. Until that point, Roma’s story was completely disconnected from Leviathan’s with the exception of a few scenes. In my opinion, this mostly has to do with the author struggling to balance world-building, character development and plot at the same time. The first half focuses on the characters and the world, and the second half is almost all plot with some character development.

I was somewhat dissatisfied by the ending of the book, which relates to my criticisms of the plot. The story doesn’t end on a cliff-hanger or anything of that nature. Instead, the last scene just feels unearned. The foundation for that scene and how it plays out wasn’t really developed. The last few chapters center around information that isn’t really delved into prior. Some of that is most likely to lay the foundation for the next book, and the overall series, but I found it odd that some of the ideas central to the end of the book hadn’t been mentioned until almost the very end.

I thought the writing itself was very good. Ana Lal Din has a very clear voice as an author, something that I can’t say for every debut work. This book deals with some heavy subject matter, as I said, and she handles discussing these things very well, without minimizing their impact on the characters. She hit the right balance to both discuss and bring attention to the issues she cares about without making the events feel so depressing that I wanted to put the book down. The story is dark, but not impossibly dark. She does a fantastic job reflecting on human nature, both the good and bad parts of humanity, while also telling a compelling story. I was able to picture the scenes she painted throughout the story. She did sometimes get a little too descriptive with things like clothing, but it wasn’t a distraction overall.

The Descent of the Drowned is not a book that’s going to be for everyone. It’s a dense story. The world can be hard to fully grasp and the story deals with some very heavy subject matter. The plot was compelling, but wasn’t made a main focus at the beginning. At the same time, it has some fantastic characters and the overall writing is rich. I didn’t like the novel quite as much as I expected to, but I can tell how much love and dedication the author put into writing this story. I’m inclined to read the next book, whenever it comes out, because I want to see where this story is headed.

Rating: 3.25 Stars

Follow Me Elsewhere:  Facebook \ Twitter \ Goodreads \ Instagram \ Buy Me A Coffee?

Support Local Bookstores (Please note, this is an affiliate link and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase)