When Two People and an Island Aren't Quite Enough: A Review of Habits of the Sea by Shea Ernshaw
- 11 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Author: Shea Ernshaw
Publisher: Atria Books
Rating: 2.5★
Content warnings: on page sexual content, isolation, codependency, and death in childbirth including the loss of a child
Ernshaw's prose is stunning. I just wish the story trusted it enough to slow down less.
Habits of the Sea at a Glance
Rating: 2.5 ★
What it's about: Ellie first saw Saltwell Island when she was twelve years old, and spent fifteen minutes there with a man named Clay before finding out a full week had passed back home. She grew up being called a liar for it. Twenty years later, she finds her way back to the island, and Clay hasn't aged a single day.
Why I had mixed feelings: Ernshaw's voice is as gorgeous as ever, but a two person cast and a plot that only moves when the sea allows it left me restless instead of swept away.
Good for readers who enjoy: slow burn romance, atmospheric writing, quiet character studies, and stories where the mood matters more than the plot.
The Island She Was Told Wasn't Real
Okay, so here's the setup, and I have to say, it's actually the best part of this book. Ellie was twelve when she first found Saltwell Island and met Clay. She was only there for fifteen minutes. But when she got home, a whole week had passed. Nobody believed her. She spent the rest of her childhood being called a liar for something she knew happened to her, and honestly, that kind of thing does something to a person. She grows up obsessed with the island while also spending twenty years trying to convince herself it wasn't real, because that's a lot easier than being the girl everyone thinks made it up.
Then, as an adult, she finds her way back. And Clay hasn't aged a single day. I loved this. It's eerie, it's sad, it gave me actual chills, and I wish the book had let itself sit in that specific kind of grief and disbelief a little longer before rushing off toward the romance.
Clay's Wife, and a Reveal That Didn't Sit Right With Me
Here's something else the book gives us early on. The night Saltwell Island broke away and became what it is, Clay lost his wife in childbirth, along with the twins she was carrying. He buried her on the island. For years, we meet him as this isolated, grieving widower, alone with that loss. It's heavy, and it's set up like it's going to matter.
Ellie ends up wearing his late wife's clothes and sleeping in her bed at one point, and she feels genuinely guilty about it, which felt like a real and human reaction to me. But then the book pulls a reveal I did not love: Clay didn't actually love his wife, not really, not like he loves Ellie, someone he's known for a month or two. And he doesn't seem to carry any guilt over that at all.
I get what the story might have been going for, but it didn't land for me. It's not romantic to find out a grieving widower just never loved the woman he lost. I wanted so much more slow burn here, Clay actually sitting with his feelings for Ellie while he's still grieving, working through what it means to have loved his wife and still be capable of loving someone new. There was a version of this where he gets to keep both, the love he had and the love he's finding, without one having to erase the other. Instead it plays out like a competition his wife was always going to lose, and that just felt icky.
The Sea Does What It Pleases, and So Does the Pacing
The premise leans hard into the idea that the sea does what it pleases and the island goes where it needs to go when it needs to go there. On paper, that's lovely world building. In practice, it means the entire back half of the book is built around waiting. Waiting for the island to drift somewhere new. Waiting for something, anything, to happen.
Because there's so little forward motion, Ellie's point of view starts to feel monotonous fast. They make love. A lot. They do gardening. A lot. Ellie gets lost in Clay's sea blue eyes. A lot. Two characters on a floating island, neither of whom is really doing much of anything, just isn't enough to carry a full length novel. I noticed the repetition the moment it happened a third time, and once I noticed it, I couldn't stop noticing it, especially every single time we circled back to those sea blue eyes.
A Therapist Who Stops Being a Therapist
Something that bugged me the whole way through is that Ellie is a therapist. Specifically, she works with kids. That's a huge part of who she is before she ever sets foot back on Saltwell Island, and it basically vanishes the second she's stranded there. Her training, her instincts, the way someone who's spent a career helping children process fear and change would presumably process her own, none of it comes up again. It's treated like a detail that didn't need to matter, and honestly, it felt like a missed opportunity to give her more depth once she's on the island instead of less.
Where Ellie's Character Completely Unravels
A few other reviewers have called Ellie's arc a slide into tradwife territory, and yeah, I'm right there with them. But the moment that really got me, the one I keep coming back to days later, is when Ellie thinks she's lost Clay for good. She doesn't fight for him. She doesn't fight for herself either. She just decides she'd rather die. No internal struggle, no resistance, nothing. For a character who was set up as independent and restless and constantly needing to be in motion, that's a huge swing, and it landed as deeply out of character to me. It made her entire existence feel like it revolved around Clay, full stop, and honestly, that's a hard thing to watch happen to a woman who used to have a whole life and career of her own.
The Romance
Since this is marketed with a strong romantasy lean, it's worth talking about the romance on its own. Clay and Ellie's relationship has real tenderness in it, and Ernshaw writes intimacy well on a sentence level. But a few things worked against it for me. There's the repetition, the gardening, the sea blue eyes, the same domestic rhythm on loop, until it started to feel static instead of developing. There's Clay's grief arc getting resolved by simply erasing his wife's place in his heart instead of making room for both. And there's that death wish moment. When your heroine would rather die than exist without her love interest, and there's no fight in her at all, it stops reading like devotion and starts reading like she's lost herself completely. That's not swoony to me. That's a little bit scary.
Final Verdict
Overall, I'd give Habits of the Sea 2.5 stars. It's not a book I'd reread, despite finishing it and genuinely loving the author's voice. The backstory with young Ellie and an unaged Clay is genuinely haunting, but the pacing, the way Clay's grief gets resolved, and where Ellie's character ends up all kept me at arm's length. I get that some of the repetition was probably intentional, meant to mirror the slowness of life on the island, but that choice wasn't for me as a reader, and the loss of Ellie's identity along the way was harder to get past.
If you love a slow, romantic story where atmosphere is the whole point and you don't mind a heroine who fully dissolves into her love interest, this may be exactly what you're looking for. But if you need more happening outside of the romance, or you want your leading woman to stay recognizably herself, this one won't hit.
Thank you to Atria Books for an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
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