Tag Archives: Rivers Solomon

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Book I Wish Were More Popular

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A gorgeous black woman dressed in a mermaid costume and sitting on the sand at the beach as the waves roll in. Her bra is metallic purple, her fin is light green, and her hair has been braided with red extensions. She’s lovely and looks very happy to be there.

It was so tempting for me to list five or six stories today, but I did follow the rules by narrowing down my choices to books that have been published in the last five years that I think should have been far more popular than they were.

My answer for this week’s theme?

The Deep by Rivers Solomon. That link will take you to the Goodreads page for it, and this one will show you my review of it from 2020.

What is it about? Without giving away spoilers, it’s about black mermaids who bear little to no resemblance to Disney’s bubblegum representation of mermaids. Their meaning is much deeper and thought provoking than that.

What I love about this novella are all of the layers readers get to unwrap as they discover more information about Yetu and her people. My impression of her changed several times as I read this book, and I keep hoping someone will finally turn it into a film or TV show.

Other themes in the storyline include intergenerational trauma, the lingering effects of racism, figuring out how to heal from the past, accepting love (both romantic and platonic), and, interestingly enough,  the many differences between aquatic and land-based organisms.

Obviously, humans in their current form cannot live in the ocean. It takes a lot of alterations to make such a thing possible and some of them created opportunities for amusing misunderstandings, so keep an eye out for those moments as they appear.

The world-building leaves a lot of space for readers to come up with our own ideas of how certain things worked or what happened in the time periods Yetu does not have knowledge of as well. This is yet another reason why we need more readers for this book and for an on-screen adaptation to happen.

I need more folks around who would like to discuss the possibilities of this world and what might happen next to the characters!

 

 

 

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: My Favourite Book and How I’d Cast It for a Movie

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Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

This is one of those topics I could write an entire book about. There are so many amazing stories out there that have either never been made into films or were made into such terrible ones that I’ll never stop hoping for a remake. (*cough* Clan of the Cave Bear).

TRed, closed cinema curtains.herefore, I narrowed this week’s topic down a little to a recent book that I’m dying to see turned into a film but has not yet been optioned so far as I know.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon was a science fiction novella written about the descendants of pregnant African slaves who were thrown overboard into the ocean as the slave ships sailed to the Americas. (My review of it is here).

The main character, Yetu, lived in a mermaid-like society that chose one member to carry all of their ancestral memories of those events and how the survivors built a new life for themselves on the ocean floor. Being assigned this role was an honour but also a burden.

While there were definitely heavy scenes to read given the references in it to slavery, murder, and the impacts of intergenerational trauma, I loved what this novella had to say about making peace with the past and finding hope in your current circumstances. It also did a wonderful job showing why it’s important to seek out supportive, kind people wherever you may find them who are willing to listen and help during tough times.

This story would be the perfect show to watch in today’s social climate for teens and adults.

An ocean wave curling in on itselfThere weren’t a ton of characters in this novella in general because of how short it was and how much time was spent on flashbacks of the past.

Some of my favourite characters who showed up later on in the plot are too wrapped up in spoilers for me to include here.

I will share actress ideas for two of the main characters who I think would be great for those roles below.

 

Yetu was the main character. She was an intelligent young woman who was roughly in her teens when the events of this tale took place. She was quite nervous about taking on such a huge responsibility and honestly didn’t want it.

I think Coco Jones would be a fantastic Yetu.

 

Amaba was Yetu’s mother. She was a well-respected woman in her community who cared deeply what others thought of her. Her daughter’s success (or failure) would have enormous repercussions on Amaba’s social standing for many years to come.

I’d love to see Danai Gurira play Amaba.

 

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Hopeful Science Fiction: St. Juju

Click on the tag “hope” at this bottom of this post to read about all of my suggestions for hopeful science fiction. If you have recommendations for future instalments of this series, I’d sure like to hear them. Leave a comment below or send me message about it on Twitter.

A few months ago, I discovered the Better Worlds series, a science fiction anthology of short stories and films about hope that was published at The Verge two years ago. This is the fifth story from this anthology I’ve covered here, and I will eventually blog about all of them.

There are mild spoilers in this post. 

St. Juju

A mushroom growing on a patch of grass. In Rivers Solomon’s St Juju, a young woman must choose between her secure enclave and the one she loves.

The characters in this book lived in a world where everyone scavenged in order to survive. Specifically, they visited ancient landfills to harvest mushrooms and other foods that grew there.

There wasn’t as much time spent on the world building as I would have liked to see, but the audience was given glimpses of the strict society that the main character and her girlfriend, Enid, lived in. Everyone was required to work hard in order for their community to have enough to feed all of its members.

On the positive side, the landfills they visited generally had food for them and they seemed to live pretty peacefully due to the strict laws that governed them and the low population density of humans in general.

What you and I consider to be trash these days has been transformed into treasure for this future generation for reasons that I’ll leave up to other readers to discover for themselves.

There were also some fascinating references to certain genetic mutations that had taken place in some people in order to help them adapt better to this environment. I love the idea of humanity and the Earth healing and adapting together like this.

The romance was handled nicely, too. Would the main character stay home or would she remain with her girlfriend and go explore parts of the world that neither of them had seen yet? That question pushed the plot to move forward while still leaving plenty of space for her to reflect on what she’d lose and gain with either choice.

I’d recommend St. Juju to anyone who likes mixing genres.

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Endless Memories: A Review of The Deep

Book cover for The Deep by Rivers Solomon. Image on cover is of a mermaid swimming past a whale.

Title: The Deep

Author: Rivers Solomon

Publisher: Saga Press

Publication Date: 2019

Genres: Science Fiction, Afrofuturism, Contemporary, Historical

Length: 175 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 4 Stars

Yetu holds the memories for her people—water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners—who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.

Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.

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.

Content warning: Death of a parent and death of a child. I will not be discussing these things in my review. The quotes below were taken from the book.

Some types of pain echo through many generations.

Yetu was an amazing protagonist. Her struggles with acting as the Historian for her community made perfect sense. That burden had been placed on her shoulders at a tender age, and it honestly wasn’t something she was prepared to handle. While I can’t go any further into her backstory without giving away spoilers, I appreciated all of the work that had clearly been put into describing her personality, why she was given this role, and how it affected her both mentally and physically.

“Living without detailed long-term memories allowed for spontaneity and lack of regret, but after a certain amount of time had passed, they needed more.”

One of the things that I wish the blurb had made clearer was how the Wanjinru processed memories, especially since the plot wasn’t shared in a chronological order. Their minds didn’t work exactly the same as a human mind does for reasons that I’ll leave for future readers to discover, so Yetu often needed to repeat things to the audience as she remembered them again or thought of a detail she hadn’t included before. I liked this device a lot, but it wasn’t something I was expecting when I started reading.

The character development was quite well done. This was even more impressive given how Yetu’s memory worked. It’s definitely not easy to show someone growing and changing when they forget certain details over time, but the author pulled it off beautifully.

“We are not Wanjiru if being Wanjiru means distancing ourselves from pain.”

I do wish this book had been longer so that more time could have been spent on the world-building. Yetu both experienced and remembered some amazing events, but she needed to spend so much time repeating certain memories and making sure they were told in the right order that she simply didn’t have as much time as she needed in order to explain those events the way I wish they’d been shared with the audience. Another 50-100 pages of writing would have given me the clues I needed.

“Forgetting was not the same as healing.”

This is also something that could easily be fixed with a sequel if the author ever decides to revisit all of the incredible characters she created here. My fingers are crossed that this might happen one day.

With that being said, the ending couldn’t have been written more beautifully. I adored the way all of the important loose ends of the storyline were tied together while still leaving room for either a sequel or lots of fodder for the the imaginations of everyone who reads it. 

I’ve decided to end this review with a link to the song referenced in the blurb. Comparing its version of events with what happened in the book was fascinating, especially since the song came first!  It does contain spoilers, so keep that in mind while deciding when to listen to it if you’re like me and prefer to avoid spoilers.

 

The Deep by Clipping

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