annotation: A Study in Drowning

[matsushima]

I was right about A Study in Drowning and I'm mad about it! It's unkind to the reader because it's a lie.
It's fiction; that means it's not real - but it doesn't mean that it's not true but resolving the authorship of Angharad this way… Look, A Study in Drowning came out in 2023; J.K. Rowling's face-heel turn started in 2018.
A Study in Drowning asks what you do when the author who wrote the book that saved your life and/or made you who you are turns out to be a scumbag and then delivers the impossibly happy ending of "just kidding! the protagonist you (over-/)identify with is actually the author!" which does nothing to guide the readers who maybe identified with Effy's struggle to survive the discovery that the author of their Magician's Book is a terrible person.
I have some other quibbles with the book but this was my other big one:

But she had faced down the Fairy King in all his eldritch power. … This battle [with the dean of the university where she is a student] was easy by comparison.

Written like someone who has never faced down eldritch horrors or the mundane human embodiments of oppressive institutions…

edit: addendum()