YA. Another book set in our world except that things supernatural are common and widely known. The two viewpoint characters are young Black women in their junior year of high school. One of those two is a siren. In this world, though only a tiny proportion of Black women are sirens, all sirens are Black women – and sirens are broadly feared and despised in a way that is all bound up with this fact, so most hide what they are. As the story opens, the defence in a high-profile murder trial justifies their client killing his girlfriend by claiming that she was a siren and she was using her powers to control him.
There is lots to like about this book, though ultimately I have mixed feelings about it. I think the worldbuilding is really interesting, particularly how the supernatural interconnects with how power and oppression work in our existing social world. It’s a pretty common thing for fantasy and sci-fi to use some sort of Otherness that doesn’t exist in the real world as a way to say things about Otherness that does actually exist, but it is also quite common for those same stories to simultaneously erase or do a poor job of directly incorporating actually existing Otherness. This book does both in a smart and sophisticated way. I also really appreciated its portrayal of the emotional realities of having to navigate the systemic and everyday violences and barriers and fear that these characters face, and what that means for choices about survival and resistance. And I thought the relationship between the two main characters, who are not biologically related but who have been made kin by circumstance, was great. But I thought it faltered a bit when it came to the storytelling – or, at least, it didn’t quite work for me, though that could be a problem with my reading of it rather than anything to do with the book itself. It just felt like it didn’t always quite fit together smoothly. Not that there were any big, glaring incongruities that I can easily point to, but rather lots of little moments where something about character motivation or the sequence of events felt ever so slightly like it didn’t quite fit or was a little bit forced.
Anyway, I loved the author’s debut novella, Mem, and there were enough things that I did like about this book that I will certainly continue to keep my eyes open for her writing in the future.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.