Fractured Tide is a YA horror novel by Leslie Lutz.
Lost meets Stranger Things in this eerie, immersive YA thriller, thrusting seventeen-year-old Sia into a reality where the waters in front of her and the jungle behind her are as dangerous as the survivors alongside her.
Sia practically grew up in the water scuba diving, and wreck dives are run of the mill. Take the tourists out. Explore the reef. Uncover the secrets locked in the sunken craft. But this time ... the dive goes terribly wrong.
Attacked by a mysterious creature, Sia's boat is sunk, her customers are killed, and she washes up on a deserted island with no sign of rescue in sight. Waiting in the water is a seemingly unstoppable monster that is still hungry. In the jungle just off the beach are dangers best left untested. When Sia reunites with a handful of survivors, she sees it as the first sign of light.
Sia is wrong.
Between the gulf of deadly seawater in front of her and suffocating depth of the jungle behind her, even the island isn't what it seems.
Haunted by her own mistakes and an inescapable dread, Sia's best hope for finding answers may rest in the center of the island, at the bottom of a flooded sinkhole that only she has the skills to navigate. But even if the creature lurking in the depths doesn't swallow her and the other survivors, the secrets of their fractured reality on the island might.
I wish I had read Fractured Tide back in the summer time! There are
so many elements that I dig in this book, and the diving, the
shipwreck, the sea monster... it all screams summer reading for me. It's
the perfect book for spending time down at the beach. Unfortunately,
2020 did not include much beach time for me so I squeezed Fractured Tide
in here at the end of the year.
Fractured
Tide has been compared to LOST a lot, and it's an accurate comparison.
It definitely has LOST vibes, and it also reminded me of The Luminous
Dead by Caitlin Starling. It's claustrophobic, and it's strange.
Fractured
Tide is told through journal entries written from Sia who is
shipwrecked on a bizarre deserted island to her dad who is in prison.
My
only complaint with Fractured Tide is it lagged in the middle for me. I
don't think I would have been as easily pulled away from the middle if I
had read it in the summertime instead of just before Christmas. I'm a
mood reader, and unfortunately it does affect me.
Along with fans of LOST and The Luminous Dead, I would also recommend Fractured Tide to fans of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. It's a thrilling book, and the strange setting adds a lot to the experience.
⭐⭐⭐💫★
3.5/5 stars
