Welcome to February, Readers! Now that the holidays are well and truly in the rearview mirror, hopefully you’ve had time and space to find something good to read!
This month we’re looking at a modern fantasy story dealing with issues of race and gender, but wrapped up in mythos about sirens, gargoyles and mermaids among others! It was released in the middle of 2020, so nearly six years ago, but it still has a great deal to say about situations we’re seeing play out today. It’s a timely read.
So, grab up your best ren faire garb and let’s go on an adventure!
Book Stats
- Author: Bethany C. Morrow.
Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle and Audible.
Price: $9.68 for hardcover, $9.88 for paperback, $9.99 for Kindle and $17.71 for Audible (Or 1 Credit!).
Length: 288 pages or 9 hours 23 minutes in audio format.
Narrator: Andrea Lang and Jennifer Haralson
Number of books in the series: Two at the time of writing.
Basic Premise
Tavia and Effie are sisters in all the ways that matter. Not by blood, but Effie was adopted into the Phillips family after a tragic occurrence that no-one can completely explain. They share a room and a few friends and they both love one another very deeply. (It’s one of the most genuine and sweet depictions of healthy sibling relationships I’ve ever read and one of my favorite parts of this book.)
Tavia is, however, a siren. As in the mythical creature that can lure someone to their death with a song. The world we find ourselves in is one that’s mostly like our own, but there’s a sprinkling of magic throughout. Giants, sprites, gargoyles, sirens, elokos and mermaids are all real, they’re all widely known about and at least somewhat understood. Sirens, though, tend to be considered problematic and very much Other as they can compel or appeal to people to do things they might not otherwise. A scary thought, to be sure. It doesn’t help that the only sirens to exist right now seem to be black women and girls. That adds an extra layer of societal pressure on the sirens themselves, and makes them a lot easier to dismiss or judge. There are even suppression collars that they can wear around others to completely dampen their powers and make the rest of the world feel a little safer. The world’s view of sirens is pretty bleak.
So much so that the discourse around a high profile murder case featuring a black, female victim is centered on the topic of the possibility of her being a siren herself. It was a case of domestic murder, where she was killed by her partner… but a lot of people are wondering if she was perhaps a siren and that’s why he did it. For Tavia, this is deeply upsetting. She has hidden her identity as a siren ever since she was little to help avoid being treated poorly by those around her and this murder case is just one more reminder of why she needs to do this.
Effie, meanwhile, was involved in a game of red rover in a park when she was nine. All the other kids turned to stone, leaving her by herself. She was thrust into the spotlight so young that she didn’t even know how to deal with it. While it was theorized that sprites were the ones that did the actual turning of the children into stone, no-one really knows for sure, and while the media hype around Effie has died down, her own internal pondering on why she was spared has not. She tends to obsess over the ren faire, where she plays Euphemia; a mermaid, betrothed to the son of a blacksmith in an ongoing yearly show that people seem to love. She even loves to swim just like a mermaid does but so far as she’s aware? She’s not one.
A gargoyle has perched on their house for the past three years. No-one knows why, and the gargoyle isn’t talking. (Yet.)
All this and they still have to navigate being high school students at a school that has some serious clique issues!
My Take
I loved this story. As you can tell by my breakdown above, there is a LOT going on. You kind of feel stranded at first because the book has to do a lot of work to catch you up on the state of the world; yes, some mythical creatures exist but not all of them. No unicorns, no vampires, no werewolves. But it’s theorized that someone at school might have giant ancestry. People are sometimes sprite-kin, meaning they have ancestry influenced by sprites which are very real. Gargoyles were made by someone but no-one knows who and it’s pretty much a certainty that no more are rolling off the assembly line so when the last one goes? That’s it – they’re all done.
So, there’s a lot of context that you need to understand the dynamic between Octavia and Effie and their world. It’s given to you little by little as the story goes on and it’s a lot of fun to uncover exactly what the state of the world is and how it differs from our own.
It does deal with issues of race, being black in America, with sirens standing in as an exaggerated metaphor for how black women are treated. How their voices can be considered dangerous by some. How they are often collared and silenced and treated as Other. How their anger, no matter how righteous or justified, could be considered dangerous by people who would be willing to do almost anything to keep them quiet. To be honest, with everything going on nationwide right now, some of this book was a little rough to read as it hits pretty close to home – there are protest scenes in this story where people are in real danger from those in authority and where good people could get hurt or killed just for trying to help one another. Unfortunately for us, there are no magical entities to swoop in at the last second and grab people out of the way of overzealous enforcement officers in our world.
So, yeah, it does get pretty heavy and more-so if you’ve watched the news recently. But, this is counterbalanced by a very sweet adoptive sibling relationship that will make you smile and a very interesting setting and world. If I had to make a recommendation, I’d say this is an excellent book for teenage readers. I think it will help them unpack a little of the world around them with the help of metaphor and with some instantly identifiable and enjoyable characters.
Our narrators for the audio version are Andrea Lang and Jennifer Haralson and they both do a really nice job of keeping everything easy to follow, keeping things emotive and interesting and differentiating between characters.
All in all, a great read. I very much recommend it.
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