excruciatingly boring. Our Wives Under the Sea belongs to the school of storytelling that tries to achieve suspense by telling one linear story in alternating past-present chapters, rather than through plot or style or language or skill. each chapter seems designed to keep the weary reader hooked just a little bit longer by ending on a cliffhanger, which is never paid off satisfactorily. the two narrators also have completely identical internal voices, so if you don’t like one of them you won’t like either of them. after crawling through a third of the novel and growing increasingly disillusioned, I finally read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia and I’m really glad I spared myself the time. not as putrid and evil as The House on the Cerulean Sea, but similar in that it’s another contemporary case of capitalizing on gay characters to sell bad writing. dumb people shouldn’t write fiction that relies on science.