Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review! 3.5 stars technically!

Knee Deep is an interesting post-apocalypse story. It follows Cricket, a young girl trying to find out what happened to her parents after their "disappearance". Her entire family works for PERCH, a militarized mining company, tasked with mining a mineral needed to assure the continuation of human life after the apocalypse. One weird thing is that I noticed the plot description describes the sewer people living in "the bowels of a utopian city that was never completed". The story itself never mentions this, so some of the locations confused me since I thought they were living in the sewers of the PERCH facility, not an entire city. The characters are interesting, and the designs of characters in the sewer can flip-flop wildly between terrifying and goofy. Some things are a bit too much on the nose, however. In the background of the office for the head of PERCH, there's a Nazi Eagle statue, and the owner of Kamikaze Corral is a Japanese man. I winced a bit seeing that Eagle. Sure, maybe the intended audience of middle schoolers won't realize what it is, but as the adult looking over it for them...yikes. Also, a cute nod to Gravity Falls with the Dipper hat. The art style was interesting. Not really to my taste, but it was good in its technical aspects. The story just felt very fast and they rushed you through the world-building a bit quicker than I would have liked. It is the first volume so I can excuse it a little bit, since most series like to info dump in the first volume, so they can focus solely on the plot in the next volumes. ( )