Strong start, but there's an overall absence of "scenes" here. For a book titled "bride of the sea," the sea is barely a character; most of the book reads like an outline rather than an actual novel; there's so much interesting shit and so many interesting relationships but we never really get to watch them play out. The parts where we do, like with Hanadi running away when she was a kid, are definitely the strong points, but overall this novel doesn't let itself explore its own implications enough, in my opinion. Khaled Hosseini does this kind of world-building much better