So overall I give it 3.5 stars. I may round up eventually, if it still has me thinking about it in a few days.

Character- and not plot-driven, THE DEEP focuses mainly on Yetu’s interior life and her role within the Wajinru culture, as well as how her individual thoughts come into conflict with that of her people, and finally the eventual tenuous resolution of that conflict. Still, Yetu’s journey is as physical as it is emotional. She finds herself washed ashore on an island, stranded in a tide pool and cared for by a woman named Oori. It is from Oori that Yetu gains perspective on the past, the origins of the Wajinru, and a possible future of love, healing and companionship. Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon review – an electrifying gothic techno-thriller". the Guardian. 2021-05-18 . Retrieved 2021-10-07.I do appreciate the creation of this story and I would even read it again, it's just a hard one to grasp. Now the Historian is Yetu, who longs to be free from the weight of pain and death and grief in the memories that are her burden to carry. The memories are destroying her, mentally and physically. “With each passing year, she was less and less able to distinguish rememberings from the present.” Driven by the need to survive, she flees — and, hurt and trapped, meets Oori, a human who is the last of her people. And now, vulnerable and far away wajinru, Yetu begins to confront the issues of identity, of loneliness, of belonging.

There were so many incredible concepts introduced, interesting side-stories and more...and they were only told in snippets...leaving me feeling like the story was unfinished and I was left in the dark. So why the reservations and the mixed feelings then? There is not much plot, really. It’s more of introspective narration and musings interspersed with bits and snippets of memories and stories. It sags and stutters in places, veers into the melodramatic and sometimes overwrought. And the ending is just too easy. Yetu closed her eyes and honed in on the vibrations of the deep, purposefully resensitizing her scaled skin to the onslaught of the circus that is the sea. It was a matter of reconnecting her brain to her body and lowering the shields she’d put in place in her mind to protect herself. As she focused, the world came in. The water grew colder, the pressure more intense, the salt denser. She could parse each granule. Individual crystals of the flaky white mineral scraped against her. Another interesting theme is "the immediate and visceral pain inherent in passing down past trauma" to your children. While it is true people need to be connected to their past, there are lingering consequences when that history is tarnished by cruelty. "When you are in pain, sometimes the only escape is another different pain."The story unfolds from the history of these water-dwellers and from the individual burdened with that unimaginable weight. The characters are foreign yet identifiable, unlike and identical to readers. In the afterward, clipping describes the development (and retelling) of the tale much like a game of "Telephone." To be a Historian means experiencing every single memory as if it was your own. Yetu however, has a fragile constitution, and so this task, this weight she carries that has stripped her of any individual identity, is killing her.⠀

bonus: audiobook is narrated by Daveed Diggs :o) (his band wrote a song that inspired Rivers Solomon to write this! highly recommend reading the author’s note at the end) Oori is not only Yetu’s friend and possible love interest, but she’s also the last survivor of her own human culture, and she has a perspective on the importance of memory which both challenges and helps Yetu to hear. However, this is juxtaposed against the revelation that the wajinru warred against the surface world a generation prior. This is told through the memories of Basha, Yetu's predecessor, who lived when the wajinru were threatened by global warming and energy companies desiring the fossil fuels lying below the ocean bed: "Below us, deep beneath the sand, there is a substance they crave. It is their life force. They feast on it like blood." Basha led the wajinru, whose emotions can telekinetically control the ocean's water, in creating a massive storm and tidal wave that wreaked devastation on the surface world. In this short extract, the fisherman David reacts to Aycayia with a human recognition of the divine that could apply to a number of Caribbean belief systems, and therefore reminds us of mermaid hybridity: ‘“Mother of Holy God on earth,” he exclaimed. “Ayyy,” he called across the water. “Dou dou. Come. Mami wata! Come. Come, nuh.”’ The merwoman, as Roffey calls her, does not respond to these magical names (but see the Learn More tab for what they mean). In a deliberate reversal of roles, it is David’s song that attracts the mermaid to him. The attraction is fatal, as it always is. And my personal jarring moment that completely took me out of the story - just one line, incongruent with the rest of the narration — the inner monologue line “Was such a thing passed down in DNA?”. Please, do not throw the reader out of the story by mentioning DNA, clearly not a wajinru concept, wajinru who refer to humans as “two-legs”. Minor, but irritating nevertheless. (Replace DNA with “blood” and it suddenly reads less jarring. Where were you, editors?)Inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping for the This American Life episode "We Are In The Future," The Deep is vividly original and uniquely affecting. I am here, Amaba. I promise,” said Yetu quietly, exhaustedly, though she wasn’t sure that was true. Adrift in a memory that wasn’t hers, she hadn’t been present when she’d brought herself to the sharks to be feasted upon. How could she be sure she was here now? The music brought her to him, not the engine sound, though she knew that too. It was the magic that music makes, the song that lives within every creature on earth, including mermaids. She hadn’t heard music for a long time, maybe a thousand years, and she was irresistibly drawn up to the surface, real slow and real interested. I didn’t hate it. I promise, I really didn’t. I’m not gonna do a typical review here, I’m just gonna share some thoughts and then do content.