Words in Deep Blue

Words in Deep Blue is a young adult romance novel written by Cath Crowley. Set in Melbourne, Australia, it concerns two best friends, Henry and Rachel, who fall in love in their teenage years but are driven apart by the current of time. When Rachel moves away, she leaves a note for Henry that expresses her love. She stows it in Henry’s favorite book in the used bookstore his family owns. When Henry doesn’t respond, Rachel suffers for several years. After the third year, Rachel’s family moves back to Melbourne. Rachel struggles to deal with the loss of her brother, who recently died in a drowning. Henry and Rachel spend time with each other again, growing back together despite the ways in which time changed them. The novel’s conception of romance validates the endurance of identity and love even as circumstances and personalities change and mature.

The novel begins by contextualizing Henry and Rachel’s relationship. It all starts in year nine of school, when Rachel develops a crush on Henry, her best friend since early childhood. Unsure how to tell him in person, Rachel decides to hide a love letter in his book and wait until he finds it of his own accord. The night she does this, Henry goes on a date with a different classmate, Amy. Afterward, he raves to Rachel about being in love with Amy. Heartbroken and unable to express it, Rachel waits for him to find the letter, but the day never comes. Months pass, and Rachel moves with her family to a much smaller town on the Australian coast. It remains ambiguous whether Henry ever found the letter stashed in the book in his family’s store.

Three years later, it is year twelve of school. Rachel returns to Melbourne, and her aunt, who she lives with, gets her a job at the used bookstore run by Henry’s family. Initially, Rachel is upset that she’s been thrown back into a friendship that ended poorly. Also feeling like she has gotten over her crush on Henry, she is reluctant to even work near him. At the same time, she is privately reeling from the loss of her brother, who drowned about a year earlier. As a result, she became extremely depressed and fell from the highest-performing science student at her school to flunking her final year of high school. Now terrified of large bodies of water, she moves back inland to Melbourne primarily due to fear of the sea that claimed her brother’s life. Rachel tries to reintegrate into a town she left behind without explaining these significant changes that occurred in the interim.



Henry, meanwhile, is elated that Rachel has returned home. He looks forward to learning why she ditched town without bidding him farewell. He is nervous and confused about what happened to their seemingly close friendship, and he doesn’t understand why Rachel has become standoffish toward him. Henry’s life has also undergone some changes: His parents have broken up and now talk about selling the bookstore. The band formed by their mutual friends is also starting to break up. He and Amy, who have been in a relationship since Rachel left, are feeling close to a split as well.

Despite the entropy befalling their relationship, which is amplified by their trepidation about the future after high school, Henry and Rachel slowly begin to reconcile. At the novel’s conclusion, Rachel finally breaks down and tells Henry about the letter in the book. He replies that he had never opened the book and thus had not seen the letter. He also expresses that he always had feelings for Rachel but wasn’t sure how to express them. The two characters end the novel realizing they are more alike than they ever knew. They look forward to a future together.

In Words in Deep Blue, the young friends’ reconciliation is contingent on each individual’s openness and empathy for the other’s narrative and emotional response. Crowley’s bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, uses the hidden note trope as a metaphor for the emotions and thoughts we bottle up and archive instead sharing with the people they are meant for. By coming to terms with each other, the novel’s protagonists realize that friendship can endure through the erosive forces of history, and they ultimately reconceive friendship as a continuous process of adaptation.