Rating:

“Here is the nature of life, we must love things with our whole selves knowing they will die.”

Author: Charlotte McConaghy

Shearwater, a tiny island near Antarctica, has a brutal shoreline. This is a place only fit for seals and penguins, a place slowly being reclaimed by the choppy ocean, a place that is gradually being drowned. It’s a space haunted by bad memories, bitter weather, and one doomed family who are trying desperately to move the world’s largest seed bank before it is swallowed by the uncaring tide. This family – the Salts – consists of a grieving father and his three children, two of whom are on the cusp of adulthood. The Salts have secrets. They know what happened to the missing researchers, why one of the cabins has a bloodstain and the smell of bleach, why the secret can never be told. And they’ve made that pact, until a wounded woman is washed ashore.

Rowan – the woman – is the erstwhile wife of the lead researcher. She has fought her way here after reading his last, distressing letter. She is determined to find out what happened to him, but her enchantment with the Salts, from the brooding father to the needy children, might hold her back from discovering the truth.

Wild Dark Shore has a dynamite write-up: half suspended between the realm of horror and the depth of besieging grief. We have secrets and survival here, battling one for one, and the complex nature of human relationships, the after shadow of loyalty topped with razor sharp questions and what might have been. It’s such a good concept – but the real payoff isn’t there.

Image by Nicolas IZERN from Pixabay

Wild Dark Shore totes itself as literary, and happily stagnates in its own twisted, layered prose and the images of barren shores haunted by man’s inhumanity. But it’s really just a story about adults who cannot communicate with one another. The big secret and all that comes before and after – it would have all been solved with one adult conversation. Rowan’s growing love of Dominic, interspersed with her assurance that he cannot be trusted, could also have been easily fixed with ONE ADULT CONVERSATION. But everyone here is broody, broken, morse, and OH SO LITERARY. All the characters, including the kids, think deep thoughts about the meaning of life and nature and letting go; they all sit around and say nothing and do even less. It’s stultifying. It’s both overwrought and underwhelming. The big, big emotions that are hinted at are not backed by any kind of action. For several hundred pages, the most exciting thing we get is Rowan refinishing a table and some seals lying on the beach.

And then, then of course we must have the complicated romance (complicated because Rowan and Dominic are apparently incapable of speech) that pops up out of nowhere and is the most inorganic love story ever written. Can you yell plot device? But we need this romance, of course, so we can talk about GRIEF and MOVING ON. This will also be tied into whales, of course, and seeds, of course. Because that is literary, dammit.

What can I say, Wild Dark Shore is boring and unrealistic. Several chapters in I could see where it was all going. This was one of those books with a lot of big words and very little actual content. I wasn’t invested, but I’d so looked forward to the story, and I’d spent money on the Book of the Month hardback, so I had to finish.

Towards the end, it gets a little better. A little faster. It’s all stupid and unlikely, but at least some stuff happens other than watching seals. Still, this is a bad novel. Not recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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