William HutsonRecensioni

I found this book not only incredibly interesting (such an unusual and creative base, and yet also so immediately immersive) but lovely and also painful.

Yetu's pain with her life and her people is telegraphed clearly, and it drew me in to her hopelessness, anger, and eventual grasp at escape - and yet the story also twines the reader into how Yetu is so badly torn even when she does escape the fate that has been killing her.

As I read more and got even further wound up in the story - both Yetu's and of all the wajinru, I truly desperately wanted a happy ending, but also dreaded where the ending would actually take me. I was, in the end, delighted with the perhaps-not-perfect but incredible resolution that managed to remove the torturous worst from Yetu as Historian . . . and to bring Oori with her, never to be left behind again.½

DNF @ 45%

This story is a lot. A lot of jumping around, a lot of telling not showing, a lot of things happening that aren't explained.

I'm starting to space out while listening so I'm letting it go.

“Forgetting was not the same as healing.”

An unusual and potentially original take on the idea of merfolk and their creation. A little confusing and disjointed at times but thought provoking. It did drag occasionally and failed to grip my interest enough for me to love it.

It was a really original premise, but for me the book was just ok. I realize that this requires a healthy suspension of disbelief, and usually that doesn't pose a problem for me with sci-fi and fantasy, but my brain just required too much explanation that wasn't there. (It doesn't help that my degree is marine biology, so I just kept trying to nitpick things, which just pulled me out of the story too much.) There are tons of people who will probably enjoy this a lot, but it just wasn't there for me.

Holy sh*t! THE PREMISE!
I can't wait to get this....

audio fiction, mermaids/merpeople descended from African enslaved women who had been tossed overboard (4 hours)

a Memory Keeper flees from her people when it becomes too much for her to continue remembering their history alone, the generational trauma so great that she almost dies from the pain-filled despair. The story is based on a song with multiple creators, itself based on the musical lore surrounding the Drexia..

March 2024 bingo challenge: Audie Award (Winner – Science Fiction – 2021)

This book is kind of wild, I've never read anything like it before. I got very lost a few times but I followed along for the most part. Also read the Afterword, it changes the perspective of the book and I just think it's really cool

Of the nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas in the 16th - 19th centuries, it has been estimated that 1.8 million died en route, their bodies, some still alive, tossed overboard into the ocean....

And the pregnant women gave birth underwater to a new civilization and species: a mermaid-like, undersea race called the wajinru, and they live in The Deep.
Inspired by the Clipping. song "The Deep", Rivers Solomon and crew have created a smart novella about memory, survival, and the burden of generational trauma that's compelling in its world-building.

"...History was not an imagining, not just stored electrical pulses. They were people who'd lived. Who'd breathed and wept and loved and lost."

The Deep tells the story of Yetu, the historian for the Wajinru, who must remember for her entire race but the history is too heavy a burden too bear. She rebels against the duty that's been thrust upon her, even as that rebellion parallels a much more perilous threat — the surface dwellers, called two-legs, who have begun to encroach on the idyllic existence of the wajinru in their rapacious search for oil. With their invasion comes the realization of a brutal truth: Yetu and her people are in fact descendants of the two-legs, the offspring of the thousands of captives thrown overboard to drown during the height of the transatlantic slave trade.

I found the Afterward describing the shared world/inspiration of the book to be quite rewarding. Don't skip on it!

a story developed over time starting from a music piece, this afrofuturism novella is very intriguing. it creates a new underwater species made from the babies born in the ocean of women sold into slavery and then thrown overboard to drown during the Atlantic passage. then years later, the Historian has to help the species remember this history and understand it, in order to survive and change their world.½

Yetu is a Historian, charged with holding all of the memories of her people. She lives in an underwater society formed from the children of enslaved mothers thrown from slave ships, who, never breathing air, learned to breathe underwater and developed gills and fins. The weight of these memories, of all of the painful things that have happened to her people from the Foremothers on, is driving Yetu almost crazy. When they hold the annual Remembering ritual, where Yetu releases the memories to the rest of her people for a brief time, she flees rather than taking the burden back. What will become of her, separated from her people and the memories -- and what will become of those she has abandoned?

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Daveed Diggs, which was delightful. I highly recommend that as a way to experience this text, if audiobooks are your thing. The story itself is immersive and a little disconcerting; you're thrown right in and have to make sense of the world as it's revealed. I'll admit that there are some flashback-like portions where Yetu is experiencing memories of the past that were a little confusing to me, especially as I couldn't page back and forth to make sense of things. Still, I found this a, well, deep read, very poignant and thought-provoking. It's a quick read/listen, but I think it will stay with me for quite a while.

Yetu is the Historian for the underwater tribe descended from African women thrown overboard from slave ships. She holds the collective memory for the entire tribe, for all of their history, so that the rest of her people need not suffer the trauma of remembering their violent past. But those memories are slowly killing Yetu, and she flees from that burden and her people. On her journey, she meets one of the two-legs and learns about the world above and what her tribe must do to survive.

Strange but powerful. I love the neo-mythic feel to the story, and I think it’s an important read. It goes on my list of books that should be required reads for high school, and could spark come great conversations.

It's The Giver but with mermaids.

The writing is really rough. Really rough. The first twenty pages consist entirely of Yetu zoning out into her "remembrances" (aka the author explains some stuff) and "nobly" suffering through her fragility; it was really lame. Gave up before anything at all happened, and I don't think I missed out on a single thing.

Powerful mythos. Such a transformative idea that I too want to see grow and multiply.

Thanks to Libro.fm and Simon & Schuster Audio for letting me listen and review this thought-provoking book.
This was a unique story. I originally thought this was a more lighthearted story with merfolk and such, but this is based on the idea of mercreatures originating from pregnant African American slaves who were thrown overboard and drowned, but their children survived and began the race of the mercreatures in the deep.
I was interested and excited to read this, but it wasn't quite what I expected and threw me a bit. It's deeper than I was expecting and mournful, which when I realized what it was about and based on then it made more sense, but at first, I was a little confused.
There were good messages here about coming to terms with the history of slavery and being able to move past it, find peace and about sharing the weight of the grief among them.
I felt like it was a bit slow-moving in parts and I was waiting for something else to happen sometimes, but it didn't. Also, there are a few things I didn't like about the romance aspect of the story in it.

This is a beautiful, painful, creative story about remembering and connecting to the past. The pregnant women who were kidnapped to be enslaved were often thrown over board on their way across the Atlantic. This is a story of their descendants who were born in the deep and survived, and what they must do to continue surviving.

Part evolution, part fantasy this slow moving story with unusual characters and names failed to engage. Summaries can be deceiving as can reviews. Regardless, there's little to comment about having read nearly half. Unlike some, I don't bother unless there's a compelling reason to finish.

The Deep was a fascinating story, involving the horror of slaves being thrown overboard by slavers, and the odd fish/mermaid/seal hybrid creatures who protect the dead slaves from the pain of remembering their past. Once a year these creatures (they're called historians, and only one can live at once) show the dead slaves the stories of their lives, and then take the memories away so they don't have to suffer. It's an odd premise, but it really works.

It's also a love story about one female historian and one "two legs" - a human woman, whom the historian meets while trapped in a tide pool. Their story is a lovely one.

I really enjoyed the audiobook. It's well worth reading. I recommend it.

Not sure I followed everything that was going on here. Definitely a solid argument for the burden and duty to remember.

Sci fi/Alt reality that birthing mothers and the newly born tossed overboard from slave ships survived and created an aquatic species.

I don't know how to rate this, so I'm not going to.

The story was brilliant. I wanted to love this. But for some reason, I couldn't connect with the style of writing. I want a story that pulls me in. I don't just want to read a story; I want to live it. But because I didn't relate to the writing style, I felt like I was looking at the story.

I had big, big feels about An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, so I knew I would be buying this, and it was kind of torture waiting for the paperback to come out (my preferred format).

This was rich and compelling but I felt a bit removed from it. Whether it was that I'd overhyped myself based on how much I loved the previous boo, that it was just not for me, or it was a bit too dark and heavy reading during the pandemic, I don't know. It was definitely moving. I think I just wanted too much to replicated some part of the experience I had with Unkindness, and this is a very different story.

Still definitely a fan of Solomon. I should probably reread this someday and give it another chance.

Mentioned in a blog post at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2020/12/21/wounded/

holy shit

Interesting speculative fiction based on a song by the same title. The book imagines an underwater world populated by the descendants of African slaves thrown overboard during the Atlantic crossing. A reclaiming of a horrifying holocaust, turning mass genocide into triumph.

A very interesting and thought provoking story.

Great concept, not sure about the execution. It gets very slow and uneventful in the middle with a lot of repetition which could be paraphrased as "they'll be all right won't they? What if they aren't? No they will be. Unless they aren't" which gets tedious.

Some of the linguistic choices are odd as well. Most of the wajinru thoughts and dialogue use an archaic, formal structure which seems appropriate for an isolated society picking it up second and third hand from hundreds of years ago but then there's phrases like "blissed out" that get thrown in and seem like they should have been caught in an edit.

It feels like it should have been either a short story or been fleshed out into a full novel; there's too little done to explore the concept and too much time spent on what little is included. The feelings associated with deep trauma are captured well, which is what elevates this from 2 to 3 stars for me (as a trauma survivor I feel a lot of the emotion here deeply) but as a story it just doesn't go anywhere.

I went into this book thinking it was going much longer than it actually was, but I think the length of this book was perfect for the story Rivers Solomon wanted to tell. There was so much power and emotion packed into less than 200 pages, I'm still reeling from it!