General Description
The book is about 300 pages long. Written in an artistic and journalistic style, an audio version is available. Difficulty level — easy.
The main characters are three girls: Kira, Li, and Tanya. The plot is not entirely linear: there is constant switching between the protagonists. Sometimes individual chapters are dedicated to one character, and sometimes to several at once — in cases where their storylines intersect.
The book explores themes of loneliness, self-discovery, societal fatigue, and the attempt to escape imposed roles. The narrative unfolds leisurely, focusing not on events but on the inner state of the characters.
The main character (or, more precisely, the central focus of the narrative) is a person in a state of internal breakdown and reassessment of life's priorities. Secondary characters act more as reflections of thoughts and fears than as fully independent actors. The narrative is intimate, at times fragmentary, with a strong emphasis on inner monologue.
The book raises questions about the meaning of life, personal responsibility, and the impossibility of fully escaping oneself. The theme of boundaries plays an important role — between past and future, stability and chaos, safety and the unknown. "The Reef" here acts not only as an image but also as a metaphor for life choices.
Opinion
For me, this book is about cults. Probably, as a person with a scientific mindset, I am unlikely to be drawn into such a structure. As experience shows, the most vulnerable are intellectually weak, lonely, and gullible people, who most often become victims of such communities.
Although the genre of the work is a novel, which I generally don't like very much, the book seemed quite true to life to me. The text contains examples and references to real events and situations. However, these elements are mixed with fictional characters, making it difficult at times to understand where reality ends and artistic fiction begins, and I had to additionally search for information about some historical events and places.
