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Book Review: The Deep by Rivers Solomon

 

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Saga Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1534439863

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Yetu is the historian for the wajniru, underwater beings created when slave traders threw pregnant African women overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. Although the women drowned, their children, born in the deep of the ocean, were transformed and have founded their own underwater society. As historian, Yetu carries the memories of all the trauma the mothers of the wajniru and the succeeding generations alone, to protect the others, and has done so for sixteen years, suffering tremendously from taking the burden alone. Once a year, she gets a three day respite from the memories when the wajniru hold a Rememberance ceremony. At that time, she carefully lets the memories wash back into the entire population so they can feel it collectively. The experience is physically as well as emotionally traumatic– author Rivers Solomon describes it as a seizure– but all the wajniru go through it together, and once they have absorbed the memories and can take no more, Yetu takes them back. Carrying all the history, violence, and trauma of her people has emotionally, mentally, and physically damaged and weakened Yetu, and since she has been carrying these memories since she was a teenager, they have overwhelmed her ability to establish her own identity. This time, after giving the wajinru’s memories back to them, Yetu decides to escape so she does not have to take on their pain again and can have an opportunity to discover who she really is.

Swimming to the surface of the ocean, away from her kind, Yetu is injured and washed into a tide pool. Thanks to nearby humans, and especially the prickly Oori, she begins to heal. An awkward friendship develops between Oori and Yetu, out of discussions about the ocean, family, and the past. Oori, the last of her people, does not know her history, and the fact that Yetu gave hers up is upsetting to her and causes Yetu to rethink whether she can really develop an identity without any knowledge of her history. It becomes clear to her that the increasingly stormy weather is probably due to the wajinru’s group anguish and that she must return to them to retrieve their history.

This story powerfully brings the point home about the physical, mental, and emotional effects of generational trauma that many Black people still experience, even generations after the end of slavery. The situation that created the wajinru is also not the only negative impact the “two-legs” have on them, even down in the deep of the ocean, as drilling for oil not only has a negative impact on the environment but causes the violent deaths of enough of the wajinru that they rise up to wash it away in a tidal wave.  The Deep is not fast paced, as for much of it Yetu is trapped in a tide pool, but it is a story that can be felt deep in the gut.

The Deep is the third iteration of storytelling based on the premise of an aquatic people born from drowned pregnant African women kidnapped to be enslaved(although each version can stand on its own).  A musical duo called Drexciya first imagined it, and their music created a mythology for an underwater utopia born from this terrible oppression. The hip-hop group clipping then wrote their own musical version, “The Deep”, a haunting song about underwater beings who rise as a collective against the “two-legs” after they begin drilling for oil, leading to dramatic climate change and destruction of the oceans, that won a Hugo Award for best dramatic performance. This novella takes the repeated line “y’all remember” from clipping’s song and focuses on the effects of history and collective memory that follow the uprising, While I’m not familiar with Drexciya, both clipping’s song and Solomon’s novella tell powerful, complementary stories about the violence and horror caused by white supremacy and enviromental destruction. Recommended.

I received this as a complimentary ARC from Saga Press through NetGalley.

Posted on November 13, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

Grand Central Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1538731338

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Acclaimed author Joe Hill promoted Imaginary Friend by saying the first fifty pages would blow you away, and I 100% agree with that. The first chapter, which takes place fifty years before the rest of the story, is absolutely hallucinatory. Jumping to the present day, the central character is Christopher, a seven-and-a-half year old boy whose mentally ill father committed suicide four years ago, and is now on the road with his mother, Kate, who is fleeing a relationship with an abusive alcoholic. Chbosky does a great job of depicting the loving, if anxious, relationship between Kate and Christopher, and I think he shows a very realistic depiction of the effects grief, and the loss of a father, can have on the dynamic between a mother and son.

Christopher struggles in school. He is mercilessly bullied by the son of the richest family in town, which also owns the retirement home where his mother works, and dyslexia prevents him from succeeding academically. One day, his mother is late picking him up from school, and by the time she arrives he has mysteriously disappeared. When he is found after six days, he can’t remember anything about that time, but everything in their lives starts looking up, from his success on a math test to Kate’s winning the lottery. But Christopher is also starting to get terrible headaches, and he is hearing the voice of someone he calls “the nice man” who wants him to build a treehouse in the woods behind the house his mother bought with her lottery winnings. Is there something supernatural going on, or is Christopher manifesting his father’s mental illness?

The story starts to run off the rails for me here. According to Chbosky, Christopher is a second grader, seven years old. But he and his peers (both friends and bullies) aren’t acting or being treated like second graders. I 100% guarantee that an overprotective single mother is not going to allow her son who was recently missing for six days to go on a sleepover without making sure that the other child’s parents were right there in the house. But that is exactly what happens. Christopher and three of his friends trick their parents into thinking that each of them is going to a sleepover at another friend’s house so they can go camping in the woods in Pennsylvania in November and tirelessly build a treehouse from complicated blueprints, stealing wood from a construction site, with rare breaks for food.

There’s an echo of It or maybe The Body here in the depiction of the four outcast boys on a mission, but the kids in those stories are living through the 1950s, when kids had a lot more freedom to roam, and in both cases, the kids in those stories were older. Some of the actions of the kids in this book would have been more believable had they been older. Chbosky, best known for his YA novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, might have done better to age his characters up to middle school. I’m  also pretty irritated that Chbosky refers to one of Christopher’s friends, who is in a special education classroom, by the nickname “Special Ed” , given to him by the school bully, throughout the book.

The story is also weighed down by a lot of unneccessary repetition. In the first chapter, every time David Olson is mentioned, it’s as “Little David Olson”, even though it’s quickly obvious that David is a young boy. It’s sometimes difficult to tell who is talking, or if they are talking or thinking, because the use of italics, spacing, font size, punctuation, and capitalization is irregular. I’m not sure if that’s intentional,or not, because it definitely adds to the sense of disorientation that Chbosky establishes from the beginning, but it also interrupts the flow of the story. Between the repetition in language and plot and the unusual formatting, the story started to exhaust me. There is also a heavy religious element that begins to take over the story and really dragged it out (there is an unexpected plot twist that jumpstarts things, but this book could still have been 300 pages shorter and been the better for it).

Where Chbosky shines is in character and relationship development, especially between family members. Kate and Christopher are at the center of the book and I am wowed by the way Chbosky portrayed their relationship. We also get a window into the lives of characters in the books who aren’t sympathetic at all, giving us a look at their generational or family trauma. I think Chbosky went a little overboard in getting into the minds of the characters of his very large cast at times. When he’s good, he’s very, very good, but when he goes over the top (and he does sometimes) he really misses the mark.

Chbosky also does an excellent job with creating truly disturbing creatures– I will never feel the same way about deer again– and it is painful, unsettling, grotesque, and terrifying to witness some of what he describes people doing to each other and themselves, over and over. This is a true horror novel that walks the reader through hell.

Imaginary Friend has received accolades from some prestigious review sources. In his acknowledgements, he cites Stephen King as his inspiration, and I can certainly see the influence. Ultimately, though, while there’s some really good stuff here, the book is flawed enough, and long enough, that many readers unfortunately won’t make it through to the end. Recommended for public libraries.

Contains: Violence, gore, body horror, child abuse, sexual situations, domestic violence, suicide, references to child sexual abuse, bullying

 

Posted on November 8, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Pet by Akwake Emezi

Make Me A World, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0525647072

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audio CD, audiobook

 

There was a time before the angels came when monsters caged children, polluted the environment, refused to send aid to hurricane victims and refugees, bombed civilians in other countries, shot up schools, and hurt and killed the people around them. The angels led a revolution, changed the laws, and replaced the monuments. Jam’s teachers tell her these angels took their names from angels who weren’t human: but they were imperfect humans doing their best to create a more compassionate, safer, and more just world, and by the time Jam, our protagonist, was born, there are no more monsters.

Or are there?

Jam, curious about the original angels, heads to the library and asks about them, but the pictures she finds are terrifying, not beautiful. She wonders, if angels are terrifying, what do monsters look like? And how would you know? Jam’s mother, Bitter, tells her, “Monsters don’t look like anything… That’s the whole point.” Bitter, an artist, has been consumed with creating a painting of a bloody, goat-legged, horned creature with metallic feathers, and after it is finished, Jam sneaks in to Bitter’s studio and accidentally cuts herself on a razor blade Bitter has embedded in the canvas. Bleeding over it opens a portal, and the creature pushes through, telling Jam to call it Pet.  Pet is a hunter of monsters, called through by her because there is a monster in her friend Redemption’s house that needs hunting, but the adults in Jam’s life are not willing to recognize that a monster could still be in their midst.

I feel like this is Emezi’s response to N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones That Stay and Fight”, which takes place in a utopian alien society where all people are respected for who they are, but knowledge of the outside world is illegal. That story ends with “social workers” executing a man found to be communicating with the less enlightened people of Earth in front of his daughter and taking her into custody to also become a social worker. In that story, questioning is not allowed and people are willing to live in ignorance of the evils of the past in order to live in their ideal society, and a child who gains that knowledge must become part of enforcing the need for that ignorance.

Pet, while it takes place in our near future, reflects some of this abstract speculative thinking, but as a book written for children, it needs to be set out in a concrete way. Emezi has created a society that is a little different from Jemisin’s: many of the people who live in the community remember the time of the monsters, before the revolution eliminated them, but they choose to believe the monsters are gone. The children born after the revolution learn about that time, but aren’t curious about it. Even knowing that they should remember the past, the people are focused on the the blessings of the present. In visiting her friend Redemption’s house, which has always seemed a loving place, Pet encourages Jam to look past the surface to see the unseen. It is uncomfortable for Jam to question what she has always seen and felt there, even knowing there is a monster in the house, and to tell Redemption about it. It is scary to learn about the monsters that existed in families in the past and realize they are still around. It is terrifying to confront trusted adults and have them refuse to believe. No one actually stops Jam and Redemption, but the adults don’t believe the monster exists, even knowing a child is suffering. Pet is there to end the hunt, and the monster, but Jam has to decide exactly what that means. Pet has a more positive vision for the future than Jemisin saw, but it is clear about the perils of believing that there can be an ideal world where monsters no longer exist.

Pet also n9rmalizes and celebrates differences without going into detail about them. Jam is a 16 year old black trans girl who is a selective mute; Redemption has three parents, one of whom is nonbinary; the librarian whizzes around in a wheelchair.  Emezi does not stick with standard English. Language is very individual and informal, and dialogue is sometimes almost musical. Without going into graphic detail. Emezi is able to communicate who the monster in Redemption’s house is, and what he has done.

While Jam is supposed to be 16, she neither acts or is treated like a 16 year old. Her thoughts and actions are more like what I would expect from a 10-12 year old, and I think she may have been “aged up” to make it possible for her to have used puberty blockers and had transition surgery (neither of these details are necessary to establish her as a transgender character, so if that was Emezi’s reasoning, the story would have benefited from aging Jam’s character down). While the story does get very dark, I think kids as young as fifth grade might be able to manage this book. At this point, fifth graders have certainly been exposed to the news, and this book gives them a way to process what they’re seeing in the media from a different perspective.  Certainly, my children both read The Giver, which has similar themes, at that age. This is a very relevant book, and while not typical horror, it does have unsettling and disturbing moments. Highly recommended.

Contains: Violence, references to rape and child sexual abuse

 

 

Posted on November 7, 2019 by , Reply
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