This is my first Hardinge’s book and definetly will not be the last one, the story is so unique and the the characters are fun and loveable, the worldbuilding is incredible.. it’s all around everything I love in fantasy book even tho there is no romance here (I think this one is categorized as children / middle grade genre book) The world is recovering after sea gods destroyed it several decades past and the remnants eke out a hard survival among the waters and the islands. I was fascinated to discover this world and get embroiled in some rather dangerous situations that turn out badly (as stories always do), but I was even more interested in the cool twists that came about soon after a certain heart showed up. Hark and Jelt had been orphaned by the same bitter winter, and this had somehow grafted them together. Sometimes Hark felt they were more than friends – or less than friends – their destinies conjoined against their wills.' When Frances Hardinge writes fantasy, it is a true fantasy indeed, in the most sincere meaning of the word - a crazy flight of imagination, an inventiveness of the strangest kind.

Jelt had saved Hark’s life, but that didn’t mean Hark owed Jelt his life. Maybe you couldn’t ever owe somebody your life, not really. You couldn’t let anyone else decide what you did with it. You had to live it yourself, as truly as you could.” I thought Hardinge handled the the situation and its pacing extremely well. Hark makes slow but steady progress in his journey towards self-discovery and self-respect. At first, I shouted at him to abandon the bully, but, as with all these things it's easier said than done, particularly for the individual required to do the doing.That said, this book is a slow burn, and does take quite a while to get going. The story takes its time to develop, the characters are slowly drawn until they feel lifelike, the world is vividly painted in all its weirdness until it feels real and lived-in, the stakes are established and the chessboard is set for the payoff. And the entire second half provides a great payoff to all the careful and elaborate set up. But what else would you expect from a Hardinge story? I think this book could be big, it could be loved by many, so keep your eyes peeled for it on October 31st! The worlds she creates are so unique, so truly different, so vibrant, so well fleshed-out that most other writers would have set as many stories as possible in such a place - but Hardinge instead with every story tirelessly creates a completely new and completely *alive* universe, with its own rules and settings and fabric, and none of those are repetitive, and all are a bit strange and beautiful at the same time. Hark could see the stories they yearned to tell, glimmering in their eyes. They could be coaxed out, with a little effort. This is a story of a young man struggling with his best friend and trying to survive in a cutthroat world where he is not valued. A blessing in disguise occurs when he is arrested and sentenced to 3 years of indentured servitude on a different island from his own. There he learns more about the gods and manages to get entangled with his friend again. Shenanigans ensue.

There are a lot of moral questions here if you want to think deep, but on the surface this is just a really unique story about a world far different from ours. I loved the complexity and the details, though there was never so much it weighed down the story and kept it from travelling at a nice steady pace. That is our fault – the fault of the priests. It is a fantasy we sold to the people of the Myriad so that everyone’s oppression would be more bearable. We let everyone tell themselves that they were watched over by gods rather than terrorized by monsters.” But this is not only the story about the Gods. It is also a story of much more mundane evils. People can create monstrosities most evil with the everyday actions, evils so repulsive precisely because of their ordinariness. What I might've been left missing still was maybe some added 'edginess' somewhere - in the story, the dialogue, or with certain enhanced character dimensionalities? Not quite sure. You will find out who you are when your choices test you. In the end, we are what we do and what we allow to be done. I'm glad I went to the trouble of getting the signed Waterstones Exclusive edition as it is nothing less than what this tale deserves.I admit I didn't absolutely LOVE this book until we were getting to the big action near the end, but between that and the final resolution, I was VERY satisfied. It pushed all my buttons. There’s a moment in the movie Barcelona where two friends are talking and one asks, “What do you call what’s above the subtext?” “The text.” “OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.” With a Hardinge novel, the subtext is always present but usually it’s a lot more fun to talk about the text. In each book, that subtext crops up to varying degrees of subtlety. In the case of Deeplight, I thought Hardinge played her hand with great care. So much so, that I fear too many people will miss what it is she’s doing here. Within this story is a pretty clear-cut examination of the relationship between fear and xenophobia. The gods, we learn, literally lived on fear. Fear, you see, always works its way into the sea, and it was there that it grew the gods and made them strong. When the gods died, a lot of that fear died as well. That, in turn, means that the people who live on the continent are less afraid to travel to the islands and this makes a lot of the islanders (particularly one specific group) worried. To their mind, it would be better to deal with a monster that was local and homegrown (and likely to eat you) than someone strange with different religions and beliefs. Better to die at the hand of the familiar than live, and maybe come to accept, the unfamiliar. Not that Hardinge makes any of this sound as clunky and obvious as I’m putting it here. She’ll just pepper it lightly throughout the book where you might notice it or might not. In one scene Hark speaks dismissively of a continental’s religion and the person with whom he is speaking lays out just how ignorant he is about the differences between different continentals. If you care, it’s there. The Myriad, island chain once home to oceanic gods, is now home to a people left bereft by the Catalclysm - a week of terror where the gods rose from the depths and tore each other apart. These weren't abstract gods, either, these were nightmares of the deep and all too real and present in the lives of those living on the islands. That kind of thing leaves a hole in the lives of the people who once lived in feat of them. The marine magic, lore and setting kept alternately reminding me of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, Rivers Solomon's The Deep, and strongest of all Robin Hobb's Liveships. All of which have in their part helped keep one encouraged to dwell into these fantastical realms for the occasional catch. This now included.

It took a few chapters for it to grab me, but in the end I really enjoyed this story. At first, I was a bit disturbed about the 2 main characters' relationship, but as the story unfolded, I knew it was going somewhere I could accept. A vast economy exists dredging these depths for godware (remnants of the lost gods) and those that can't afford a submarine dive. The result is a sub-culture of sea-kissed - individuals who have either partially or fully lost their hearing due to accidents underwater or long-exposure to high pressures. Their presence was a treat and I hope that other authors include deaf characters in future. Woven throughout is a testament to the power of story to preserve memory, to preserve identity, and to keep alive that which would otherwise pass from existence.

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The gods of the Myriad were as real as the coastlines and currents, and as merciless as the winds and whirlpools. Then one day they rose up and tore each other apart, killing many hundreds of islanders and changing the Myriad forever.' Deeplight is part adventure story with deep sea diving and sneaking around, plus a mad scientist and the very weirdest submersible I've ever come across (operated by producing notes at the precise resonant frequency of godglass) : I have so much love for this book that I cannot express it properly and I urge you to read it. It's beautiful inside and out.