Is June a plane crash mystery month or something I don’t know about? Beyond the Moonlit Sea is the second eARC I’ve read with a lost plane at the centre of the narrative (see: The Gravity of Missing Things).
I may be in the minority here – the GoodReads rating is very high – but I found Olivia to be an insufferable perspective to read. To be fair, though, Dean and Melanie’s perspectives were not much better. Olivia and Melanie are two sides of the same coin. A very unstable, slightly insane coin. I didn’t mesh well with the writing style, and even though most of this narrative was entirely outlandish, it still managed to be incredibly predictable.
I would have loved to have seen Dean’s childhood trauma explored further; it was addressed so quickly and then basically forgotten. Dean makes so many questionable choices, Beyond the Moonlit Sea would have been much more compelling if the motivation, or even the ability, to make these choices had been analysed. All of the characters felt very shallow, but this failure to examine Dean’s past further, I believe, affected the narrative the most.
So much unexplored potential made Beyond the Moonlit Sea frustrating rather than engaging.