Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

This is the worst book I’ve read in 2026 so far. And possibly even in 2025.

I picked up Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant because someone here on Reddit recommended it to me. To whoever that was, I hope you have insomnia for a month. Smh.

Let me start with the one nice thing:

The plot was good. Like, actually good. The setup had potential. But potential is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here. This could’ve been great. Instead, it landed squarely in “wow, that was a waste of a cool idea” territory.

The characters though…

They felt so forced. It’s like the author was aggressively trying to make me like them by shoving their inner monologues and tragic backstories down my throat every five pages. It didn’t work. At all.

And it was painfully predictable. I could tell exactly which characters were going to die the moment they were introduced. Zero tension. And when they inevitably did die? I still didn’t care. That’s the real crime. I couldn’t even pick a favorite to root for.

I know the author (Seanan McGuire) is openly queer/biromantic, But the homosexual relationship here felt pushed. Not organic. It felt like the author reallyyyy wanted to include representation, but it didn’t actually add anything meaningful to the characters or the story.

(For the record: not anti-representation, Just anti-badly-done-representation.)

The sirens themselves?

Cool concept. No complaints there. But the execution felt like a weird mashup of “being hunted by Xenomorphs on a ship” and “being hunted by intelligent raptors in Jurassic Park.” I get what she was trying to go for. It just didn’t land for me. At all. The tension never hit the way i wanted to.

Overall, this book felt like it wanted to be intense, emotional, scary, and character-driven… and it missed on most of those for me.

I get that not every book is for everyone.

This one definitely wasn’t for me.

On to the next read.