Aqueous
Aqueous
Leaving the grand pavilion, I proceeded through shades of blue toward the next trial. It was the more basic description of human submergence—blue, like the way I was feeling. From icicle hues near the station’s exterior floodlights, to shades so close to midnight that they rivaled the darkest black, the ocean’s watery embrace cocooned us in a kaleidoscope of blue that permeated the station and saturated our existence. Beautiful, beguiling, melancholy, and deadly, the blue arms of the ocean cradled us, danced for us, and threatened us. She was an intoxicating nymph, captivating and seductive, yet dangerous and unrelenting at the same time. As refugees, her blue shelter had welcomed us and then restrained us, knowing that we were powerless to escape, and it would be easy to forget the beauty of the blue, were it not for the arboretum.
The vast, multi-levelled garden had hundreds of resident botanists assigned to its care. They watered, misted, pruned, plucked, pollinated, and planned crops from seed stock stowed safely away. As caretakers of Mother Nature, their gentle attention to invaluable crops helped to recycle wastewater, generate oxygen, purify air, feed hunger, and put clothes on backs. Their clever crop rotation eliminated food fatigue—a terms used by residents who had been forced to digest an abnormally large harvest of one specific perishable. For example, growing sweet potato hadn’t been considered since a bumper crop three Thanksgivings ago.
Mundane, yet important work, an arboretum assignment was not what I wanted; however, I did enjoy visiting periodically to imagine an earthly world. A world where healthy landscapes grew under a clean, clear sky, suspending a friendly, sunny star; a place where farmers felt the cool breeze on the glistening sweat of their skin as the hum of their heavy equipment drifted across an open field. The arboretum was a wondrous reprieve from a world full of blue.
Aqueous is a first-person exploration of a post-apocalyptic world in a near future world where, because Earth is no longer inhabitable, a sector of the population moves into a human-built refuge in the ocean. Marisol Blaise, the 16-year-old protagonist of the narrative, was placed with a high-ranking couple as they began their journey underwater as a desperate attempt by her mother to save her then young daughter. Marisol has a few memories of her life above ground, evidenced by interjecting chapters describing her memories with her biological family and the dying world that was once her home, but her biggest focus in the story is passing her Y10 tests and being assigned as a Cuvier for the Aqueous station. Cuviers are prestigious divers that complete the most dangerous tasks for the residents of Aqueous, and, in the history of the settlement, there has never been a woman Cuvier. Marisol, incredibly intelligent and athletic, has crafted almost her entire Aqueous existence to help her reach her goal. Readers learn about life on Aqueous, Marisol’s friends and family, and the rigorous tests that all Y10 students must complete to determine their future placement in the underwater world. Clues appear throughout the narrative that make it clear to the audience: things are not quite as simple in this underwater world as they may seem, especially when it comes to Marisol’s future.
The premise of this novel is compelling, and readers who enjoy dystopian/post-apocalyptic action stories will be intrigued by the idea of civilization moving deep underwater to survive the scorching of the above-ground Earth. However, the writing style is quite dense, and it felt like work to read through intricate descriptions of the station or the ocean to get to the moments of action and character development. I repeatedly found myself wanting to skip paragraphs so I could learn about the next challenge that Marisol was going to face, and what her outcome would be in that challenge—not because I was so enticed by the plot progression that I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next, but more because I was bored by the tediousness of reading description after description that seemed to start each chapter. I wanted more about the underbelly of Aqueous, more about the future of the underwater system, and more about the different officials and family relationships that seemed important, but barely described. I felt like I had a competent understanding of the crushing darkness and blue of living deep underwater but was reading another description of the ocean every twenty pages or so.
Aqueous has a large cast of characters, and they work well as parallels or foils for Marisol’s quest to become a Cuvier. Marisol’s love interest plot line was a little bit shallow, and it was disappointing to see one character go from finally being likeable in the eyes of Marisol to being described as giving off a “teenage, man-eating vibe” with whiplash speed, but Marisol’s best friend Naviah stays consistently charming throughout the narrative, and a few others become increasingly endearing as the story builds.
Overall, if you are looking for a dystopian-esque read with twists, turns, and an unpredictable ending, Aqueous probably won’t hold your interest. The plot twists are moderately predictable, and the sheer amount of action crammed into the last few pages to create a cliffhanger to continue the series felt out of place compared to the rest of the text. This isn’t a book I would re-read or one where I add the next in the series to a pre-order list, but I would check-in to book two to see what happens to Marisol and Aqueous if it came into my life by chance.
Lindsey Baird is a high school English teacher living on Treaty 7 territory in Southern Alberta.