Inland is a young adult novel that focuses around 16 years old Callie Morgan and she had spent fighting an illness for about 10 years and it has basically defined her life.
When she was younger around the age of six she was out in the ocean and her mother drowned and because of this her father decides to move her away from the ocean. Now they are living in Middle America and her father works as a professor at different universities and just trying to make it through life because when she moved her lungs just failed to function, they would fill with liquid and there are a lot of different problems, due to which she never really had any friends.
They move a lot to try different treatments at different places which makes life for Callie very hard. However the things changed when Callie father gets a really good deal to move down south near the Gulf of Mexico to work on a particular project to do with his field of study and Callie comes along with him and suddenly her lungs stop bothering her. Which turns out to be great because now she can live a normal life, but at the same time there is something about the water that keeps calling her to it.
I can tell from the first few chapters that this book is going to be creepy and probably a bit confusing that is because of the fact that Callie is an unreliable character and this is because when she starts getting drawn to the water and things starts happening you don’t really know who to believe and this leads me to the main issue I had with this novel which is that I wanted to know where the source of getting called to the water is coming from, was it all is in her head and probably she is going crazy or did it had a magical element to it. I didn’t get the answer till the very end, and honestly, I wanted to know this early on in this book.
The romance between Callie and her boyfriend Ben is actually very believable, which is a very hard thing to make it work in a lot of young adult novels nowdays. The other thing I liked about this novel is the strong writing style and there are some really beautiful passages which are hard to find in a typical young adult novel which helped to elevate this novel to a new level.
It is a well written novel and I enjoyed the romance, which is the happy aspect of the story, but at the same time the slow pacing bothered me too much.