Beyond the Sea by Melissa Bailey - book review

I didn't mean to buy this book, I haven't heard anything about it before I bought it either but I wish I didn't.

It was an impulse buy, I was looking for a book I read when I was 14 when I found this one. All I remembered about it was that it was a thriller and it had a lighthouse on the cover somewhere. Unfortunately, I didn't find the book I was looking for, I'm not even sure if it had a lighthouse on the cover anymore, but while searching for it I found other books that seemed like they would be a good read. 

Beyond the sea was one of those books. 

"A year on, and struggling to cope, Freya returns to the lighthouse keeper's cottage on a remote Hebridean island, where she and her family spent so many happy times 

Haunted by visions of her old life, Freya's dreams are dark and disturbed. And when a stranger, Daniel, is washed ashore during a storm, they turn even more menacing. 

As dreams and reality start to merge, Daniel seems to be following Freya's every move. What does he want from her and is he everything he seems to be? 

Is her mind playing tricks? Or is the danger she senses very real? "

That book description promises an amazing, mysterious thriller but unfortunately, it does not deliver. 

I wish this book ended after the prologue. I wish Freya never took over the narrative and this book was just about a father and the son out in the sea, looking at birds through their binoculars.

It would be a completely different book but it would be a much better one.

From the very beginning, Freya's monologue is bland and uninteresting. I expected this to be set many years after the accident but it's set only a year after but everyone in the story is pretending like 20 years has passed. 

When it's done well I love when an author describes stuff using a very fancy language, even if I don't understand half of it. It makes me feel like a Victorian lady. But only if it's done well. Unfortunately for Beyond the sea that's not the case. 

Bailey's descriptions are just bland and simple for most of the time until she starts describing memories or people. Then her writing sounds like she swallowed a dictionary and started spewing out words at random and hoped they would make sense in the end.  

Speaking of memories. The switch between the current events and Freya's recollections is confusing at best. Many times I catch myself trying to understand the reason why they are there because they contribute absolutely nothing to the story. And even when they do Freya's description of them is just bland and boring and makes me question if she cared at all for her husband and child. 

To finish off. Jack and Sam. They were portrayed so beautifully in the prologue. I loved the father and son bonding trip on the sea. Unlike Freya, Jack actually seemed to give a damn about their kid and was actually interested in what he was saying. Where Freya only seems to focus on the most random of conversations that frankly made no sense at all 

I had high hopes for this book, it truly seemed like it was going to be an interesting read but only after a few chapters I'm giving up on it. I don't like not finishing books. In all my life the only book I never finished (on purpose) was the Never Ending Story but I was twelve and I had the shortest attention span so if the book didn't have something big happening on every page it was really hard for me to read. 

Maybe I made up my mind too quickly, maybe this book gets better and if I gave it a few more chapters I would've loved it. But I doubt it. With every page, I struggled more and more and I don't think there is anything that could make this book good. 

Final rating: 3/10 (only because of the prologue)