It is excellent. It's a short novel, told in the second-person, running through the romance of two real-life, honest-to-Blackness, young creative people as they fall in love across London and Dublin. It's romantic, though it eschews all the hallmarks of traditional romance. It's the most satisfying slow burn. It's lyrical, clearly poetry. Throughout the book there's intertwining structure which seems to make real everything that goes on in the book, and makes it intertextual with the world. In battle rap, when a rapper shoehorns in an irrelevant word for the sake of a cheap reaction or laboured rhyme, we say the rapper is 'reaching'. The references here though are integral to the lives of the characters. Azumah Nelson's not reaching, he's a basketball player dribbling effortlessly, swishing threes, and watching the ball roll back to his feet. The poetic prose uses lyrical repetition, reading like sestinas with repeated refrains, the rhyme patterns of  Hip Hop and grime 16s, to link the text to itself across time. The world of Open Water's narrator is built on writers like Baldwin who taught us what it looks like to strive publicly and privately to be a good man and an honest writer, on Teju Cole and Sareeta Domingo who write so eloquently of the construction of Black identities in resistance to oppression, musicians like Dizzee, ATCQ, Kendrick, Playboi Carti and their freedom in expression in words and rhythm over beat, filmmaker Barry Jenkins and the tenderness of Black lovers, glowing in the deep blue light that illuminates after magic hour, after the day and before the night, and the beautiful nuances of Black identities represented in the artist's Lynette Yiadom-Boakye portraits of fictional Black people, even the overspilling of rage and loss and frustration from Cuba Gooding Jr from Boyz In Da Hood is invoked.

It's about fractures, joints, breaks, and reconstruction. It's about planting seeds, staying true through the seasons, growth as a person whether away from the self-inflicted cowardly things we go, or through the pain and struggles of troubles that blindside us and feel like injustice meted out by pernicious supernatural beings and malicious, callous systems. It's about refusing to drown but being afraid of living, it's about breathing, always breathing, even when surviving in dangerous waters. It's about loving as an expression and extension of the full self, and an embracing of the Black self, and communicating that with a partner. 

The lines in this book have the feel of philosophically resounding truths and modern day parables told through the lives of a Black British couple. A la Inside Out, the setting is their lives and their love, and the story is the act of Black British living. This novel is so beautifully latticed, it repeats and remixes itself, it grows in meanings with each re-reading, and it points to the expanse and depth of emotions so often unseen in the stories of Black men - in fiction, and in real life. 

Also, when this book gets optioned to be made into a drama series, the line "if flexing is being able to say the most with the least amount of words, is there a bigger flex than love?" will be unavoidable on merch and posters and across your social media.