Blog Tour: Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan (Review + Excerpt + Giveaway!)

Happy Monday and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for DAUGHTER OF THE DEEP by Rick Riordan! I’m so excited to share my review with you today, AND an excerpt, AND more information about the author and tour, PLUS you can enter the giveaway to win a print copy! And now without any further ado, let’s get to the review!

I received this book for free from Rockstar Book Tours in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan
Published on October 26, 2021 by Disney-Hyperion
Genres: Contemporary, Mystery, Neurodivergent, Thriller, YA
Pages: 352
Format: ARC
Source: Rockstar Book Tours
Add to Goodreads
Author Links: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon, Instagram

New York Times #1 best-selling author Rick Riordan pays homage to Jules Verne in his exciting modern take on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Ana Dakkar is a freshman at Harding-Pencroft Academy, a five-year high school that graduates the best marine scientists, naval warriors, navigators, and underwater explorers in the world. Ana's parents died while on a scientific expedition two years ago, and the only family's she's got left is her older brother, Dev, also a student at HP. Ana's freshman year culminates with the class's weekend trial at sea, the details of which have been kept secret. She only hopes she has what it'll take to succeed. All her worries are blown out of the water when, on the bus ride to the ship, Ana and her schoolmates witness a terrible tragedy that will change the trajectory of their lives.
But wait, there's more. The professor accompanying them informs Ana that their rival school, Land Institute, and Harding-Pencroft have been fighting a cold war for a hundred and fifty years. Now that cold war has been turned up to a full broil, and the freshman are in danger of becoming fish food. In a race against deadly enemies, Ana will make amazing friends and astounding discoveries about her heritage as she puts her leadership skills to the test for the first time.

did i like it?

I LOVE THIS BOOK WITH ALL OF MY HEART!!!

Plots and pretty covers are why I add books to my tbr, but there are two things that really make or break a book for me: characters and narration. Rick Riordan is, in my opinion, the master of both. He imbues even the saddest story lines with humor and hope. All of the characters in Daughter of the Deep– Ana, Ester, Nelinha, Dev, Gem, Luca, Ophelia, Jupiter, Socrates, and everyone else whose names I can’t remember right now- feel like real people. They make choices, good ones and bad ones, and they have to live with the consequences of those choices. I also love how the world building is worked into this story. Riordan takes the world we know and changes it just enough that I totally believe there’s a cold fusion powered submarine crossing the Pacific right now. Truly, I love this book, and if there’s one thing you take away from this review, let it be this: GO GET YOURSELF A COPY RIGHT NOW AND START READING!  You’ll love it, too.

favorite character?

ESTER HARDING IS MY FAVORITE!!!

(but also I really love Ana, Gem, Nelinha, Jupiter, and Socrates!)

Why did i read it?

I heard “new Rick Riordan book” and I came running (figuratively). need I say more???

will i re-read it?

YES TWENTY THOUSAND PERCENT!

three words to describe the book

action, humor, betrayal

what i said on goodreads

• so far this is like a mashup of Percy Jackson and Gallagher Girls, aka my FAVORITE BOOKS OF ALL TIME! so yeah, I’m loving this 💜💜💜
• Action! Aventure! Explosions!
• it’s taken me over a hundred pages to put together the words for why I love Ester and this story so much. it’s because Ester is allowed to just BE autistic. she talks in CAPS LOCK when she gets excited or emotional, and she doesn’t make eye contact, and she has a support dog, but she also has friends. she isn’t bullied, she’s respected. no one is trying to ~fix~ her. it’s refreshing and I fucking love it. <3
• nope. nope nope nope nope nope.
• WOW. AMAZING. PERFECT. LOVELY.

okay, this cover is PERFECTION!!! I looked at it before I read the book and had some guesses (that were mostly wrong), and then I looked at it after I read the book and WOW!!! Ana, Gem, Romeo, the Nautilus, the OCEAN, just… I love this cover!!!!

11/10 stars!!!

• The Light at the Bottom of the World by London Shah
• Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan
• Gallagher Girls by Ally Carter
• Young Captain Nemo by Jason Henderson

• #bless rick riordan and his genius
• #action! adventure! island exploration! newly rich dumbasses! family is what you make it!
• #this is why communication is key my dudes
• #curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal

I’m putting these under a spoiler warning for two reasons. One: there are TWENTY SEVEN of these. That’s a lot. Two: there are some VERY SLIGHT spoilers. Actually, hang on. Never mind, the things I thought were spoilers are actually part of the jacket copy. Okay. Here we go!

View Spoiler »





































































































« Hide Spoiler

CHAPTER THREE

“Freshmen.” Dr. Hewett says the word like an insult.

He stands in the aisle, bracing himself with one hand on the seatback. He breathes heavily into the bus’s microphone. “This weekend’s trials will be very different from what you might be expecting.”

This gets our attention. Everybody fixes their eyes on Hewett.

The professor is shaped like a diving bell—narrow shoulders tapering down to a wide waist, where his rumpled dress shirt is half untucked from his slacks. His frazzled gray hair and sad, watery eyes make him look like Albert Einstein after a night of running failed calculations.

Next to me, Ester shuffles through her index cards. Top rests his head in her lap. His tail thumps softly against my thigh.

“In thirty minutes,” Hewett continues, “we will arrive in San Alejandro.”

He waits for our whispering to die down. We associate San Alejandro with shopping, movies, and Saturday-night karaoke, not end-of-year trials. But I suppose it makes sense we would start there. The school’s boat is usually moored in the harbor.

“We will proceed directly to the docks,” Hewett continues.

“No detours, no side trips to buy refreshments. You will keep your phones off.”

A few kids grumble. Harding-Pencroft strictly controls all communication through the school intranet. The campus is a cellular dead zone. You want to look up the breeding habits of jellyfish? No problem. You want to watch YouTube? Good luck with that.

The teachers say this is to keep us focused on our work. I suspect it’s yet another security precaution, like the underwater grid, or the armed guards, or the drone surveillance. I don’t understand it, but it’s a fact of life.

Typically, when we get into town, we’re like dehydrated cattle at a watering hole. We stampede to the first place with free Wi-Fi and drink it in.

“I will have further instructions once we’re at sea,” Hewett says. “Suffice to say, today you’ll find out what the academy is truly about. And the academy will find out whether you can survive its requirements.”

I want to think Hewett is just trying to scare us. The problem is, he never makes idle threats. If he says we’ll have extra weekend homework, we do. If he predicts 90 percent of us will fail his next exam, we do.

Theoretical Marine Science should be a fun fluff class. We spend most of our time contemplating what ocean technology might look like in one or two hundred years. Or if science had taken a different course, what might have happened? What if Leonardo da Vinci had done more to develop sonar when he discovered it in 1490? What if the plans for Drebbel’s “diving boat” hadn’t been lost in the 1600s, or if Monturiol’s anaerobic steam-powered submarine hadn’t been scrapped for lack of funding in 1867? Would our technology today be more advanced?

It’s cool stuff to think about, but also . . . not so practical? Hewett acts as if his questions have right answers. Like, it’s theoretical.

How can you give somebody a B minus on their essay just because their guess is different than yours?

Anyway, I wish Colonel Apesh, our military-tactics professor, were chaperoning this trip. Or Dr. Kind, our physical fitness teacher. Hewett can barely shuffle a few feet without getting winded. I don’t see how he’s going to judge what I imagine will be intensely physical underwater trials.

He turns over the microphone to Gemini Twain. Gem has made our group assignments for the weekend. We’ll be divided into five teams of four, one member from each house. But first, he has a few rules to tell us about.

Of course he does. He is such a Shark. You could put him in charge of a toddler soccer team and he’d get delusions of grandeur. He’d have the kids marching in perfect unison within a week. Then he’d declare war on a neighboring toddler team. He rattles off a list of his favorite regulations. My attention wanders. I look out the window.

The highway winds from switchback to switchback, hugging the cliffs. One moment, you can’t see anything but trees. The next, you can trace the entire coastline all the way back to HP. When the school is in full view, I spot something strange in the bay. A thin line of wake heads toward the base of the cliffs, just where Dev and I were diving this morning. I can’t see what’s making it. There’s no boat. It’s moving too fast and too straight to be a sea animal. Something underwater, under propulsion.

The pit of my stomach feels like I’m free-falling again.

The wake line splits into three segments. It looks like a trident, its prongs racing to jab the coastline beneath the school.

“Hey!” I tell my friends. “Hey, look!”

By the time Ester and Nelinha get to the window, the view has disappeared behind trees and cliffs.

“What was it?” Nelinha asks.

Then the shock wave hits us. The bus shudders. Boulders topple into the road.

“Earthquake!” Gem drops the mic, literally, grabbing the nearest seatback to steady himself. Dr. Hewett is thrown hard against the window.

Cracks splinter the asphalt as we skid toward the guardrail. All twenty of us, well-trained freshmen, scream like kindergarteners.

Somehow, Bernie regains control of the bus.

He slows, looking for a place to pull over. We round another bend, and HP comes into view, except now . . .

Ester screams, which starts Top whimpering in her lap. Nelinha presses her hands against the glass. “No. No way. No.”

I yell, “Bernie, stop! Stop here!”

Bernie pulls into a turnout—one of the scenic overlooks where tourists can snap pictures of the Pacific. The view is clear all the way back to HP, but there’s nothing scenic about it now.

Kids are crying. Their faces press against the windows. My insides twist with disbelief.

A second shock wave hits us. We watch in horror as another massive wedge of earth calves into the bay, taking the last of those beautiful sugar cubes with it.

I shove my way down the aisle. I hammer on the doors until Bernie opens them. I run to the edge of the cliff and grip the cold steel guardrail.

I find myself mumbling desperate prayers. “Three-Eyed One, Lord Shiva, who nourishes all beings, may He liberate us from death. . . .”

But there is no liberation.

My brother was on that campus. So were 150 other people and an aquarium full of marine animals. A square mile of the California coast has crumbled into the ocean.

Harding-Pencroft Academy is gone.

One

two

 

Week One

10/1/2021	BookHounds YA	Excerpt
10/2/2021	YA Books Central	Excerpt

Week Two

10/3/2021	Locks, Hooks and Books	Review
10/4/2021	The Bookwyrm’s Den	Review
10/5/2021	Kait Plus Books	Review
10/6/2021	Simplybeccamee	Review
10/7/2021	YA Book Nerd	Review
10/8/2021	Nonbinary Knight Reads	Review
10/9/2021	Books and Ladders	Review

Week Three

10/10/2021	More Books Please blog	Review
10/11/2021	Bri’s Book Nook	Review
10/12/2021	Lexijava_Bookish	Review
10/13/2021	Zainey Laney	Review
10/14/2021	@moonlight_rendezvous	Review
10/15/2021	@jypsylynn	Review
10/16/2021	Sometimes Leelynn Reads	Review

Week Four

10/17/2021	Nerdophiles	Review
10/18/2021	History From A Woman’s Perspective	Review
10/19/2021	The Momma Spot	Review
10/20/2021	Books a Plenty Book Reviews	Review
10/21/2021	Books Are Magic Too	Review
10/22/2021	Lifestyle of Me	Review
10/23/2021	Stuck in the Stacks	Review

Week Five

10/24/2021	@fictitious.fox	Review
10/25/2021	@drewsim12	Review
10/26/2021	laura’s bookish corner	Review
10/27/2021	two points of interest	Review
10/28/2021	Feed Your Fiction Addiction	Review
10/29/2021	@abackwardsstory	Review
10/30/2021	Popthebutterfly Reads	Review

Week Six

10/31/2021

BookBriefs

Review

Enter here to win a print copy of Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan!

(US Only)

What do you think about Daughter of the Deep? Have you added it to your tbr yet? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!