The Deep

I had high hopes for this one, coming from a clipping song and read by Daveed himself! Unfortunately, and weirdly, he reads this like it's a children's book, which is a super disservice to the serious, tragic, and haunting tone of the material. This is a short novella, but I couldn't even make it through all 4 hours of the audiobook without speeding it up and even skipping some super cringey parts. It's incredibly repetitive and the middle parts drag on. Some action picks up at the end but I was so uninvested by then that I wasn't moved by it.

It's definitely a 3.5 but I'm rounding up.

I got the advance listening copy of this book a couple months ago and while I was very fascinated by its premise, I didn't have any plan as to when I wanted to read it. But when I was thinking about with which book I should start my 2020, I just decided to pick this up on an impulse. And woah what a choice for the first day of a new decade.

There's just no easy way to describe the writing in this novella. It's a bit too flowery for my taste, so it took me sometime to get acclimated to it, but it's also hauntingly beautiful and emotional and made me feel a lot. Discovering the history of the wajinru, their ancestry tracing back to the pregnant African slaves thrown overboard slave ships, and how they grew to communicate and build their own world in the depths of the sea is a very interesting read. We could have definitely benefited from a little more world building but I think it's slightly vague on purpose, going along with the story's underlying themes of the importance of history and memories - how valuable it is to carry forward memories even when generational trauma can be painful, alleviating the pain by sharing the burden with the community, and understanding our history so that we can move on and build a better future.

The story really rips out your heart at times and you can feel the pain and anguish and loneliness that the main character Yetu is feeling; on the other hand, you can also feel all the tenderness and flutters of a newly formed connection when Yetu encounters someone. It's such a beautiful exploration of an unlikely relationship and I was amazed at how well it was captured in so few pages. The other relationships of her life are also well developed and we see her changing dynamic with every one of them, including her understanding of her history and her responsibility towards her people.

In conclusion, I truly can't tell whom I want to recommend this book to. If you enjoy fantasies which are unique and beautiful and probably weird, and leave you with lots of thoughts and emotions, maybe this one is for you. I alternated between the book and the audio and both formats worked well for me. I don't know if I'll ever reread it but I have a feeling I might discover something more in its words if I do.

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.

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.

I don't know what to say about this book. I liked it, but I can't say exactly why. Yetu was very frustrating, which normally makes me not like a book, but she was working thought a whole lot of things and growing. I liked the way that history and present interacted with each other. It was obviously important for the story, but it felt important for real life too. I liked the way the book felt like a legend coming to life.

The central metaphor at the heart of The Deep is both beautiful and sorrowful, a what-if of historical fantasy branching away from one of the worst things one group of humans has ever done to another. If the story was just that, it would have been good. The story Solomon weaves around that metaphor elevates The Deep to greatness.

Pros: interesting mythology, sympathetic protagonist

Cons:

Yetu is the Historian of the wajinru, sea dwelling descendants of pregnant slave women cast overboard. The memories of the ancestors overwhelm and pain Yetu, so they conceive a plan to leave the memories behind.

The Afterward mentions that the idea behind the wajinru comes from the mythology written by the music group Drexciya (James Stinson and Gerald Donald). Another music group, Clipping (rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes) wrote the song “The Deep” (nominated for a Hugo award in 2018) based on that mythology. The narrative of Basha, one of the ancestors whose story is told in this novella, incorporates the war with the two-legs that “The Deep” speaks of.

The mythology of the story is strangely poetic as it takes something horrifying and turns it into something beautiful. And while the story is fairly short, there's a lot to take in. There's a real weight to it, a depth that makes the underwater world feel real and lived in.

The idea of a singular memory keeper reminded me of Lois Lowry's The Giver, but I much preferred the ultimate solution the protagonist comes up with here for how to deal with memories as a population that wishes to forget the past while having it accessible, without having a singular member of the group subsumed by those memories. I appreciated that Yetu had anxiety and this caused the memories to weigh on them even more than on past historians.

It's a sad, touching, and ultimately hopeful story that's definitely worth the read.

Good story and well told, I think.

I love that there was a happy ending, even though it was so, so, so very painful to get there.
I love that her mother understood at last, and saved her. We need out mothers to understand and save us.
And I realized that we white people can never, ever understand the horror of slave trade. I mean... we like to point out that white people have been slaves, too, that whole peoples of white people have been seen as lesser beings... but not even these people were seen as... I don't even have words. Not as animals, but as some sort of caricatures of human beings, or... living dolls, or something. Similar enough to rape them, use them to alleviate loneliness, take advantage, but different enough to hate...
All these people just thrown overboard because... cargo shouldn't have demands. :´(
The axe forgets; the tree remembers.

Yetu is the appointed historian for her people. She was chosen at the young age of 14 to carry the memories of her people, the Wajinru. Memories that would destroy them as a people if they had to carry them year round, but also memories that starve and bring relentless hunger for knowledge if they do not remember their past.

Once a year there is a Rememberance where The Historian will push the memories into the Wajinru so they suffer the history of their descendents as one and then in turn become “full” with the knowledge they hunger for. It is The Historian's job to collect the memories back once the remembering is complete otherwise the Wajinru will, in a sense, explode.  They cannot handle the history of what was.

However this Rememberance Yetu has other plans...she is running away after transferring the descendents' memories and leaving the entire Wajinru people to their fate. She is tired of the constant pain and suffering she endures carrying the history. She knows if she takes the memories back this time...she will die.

For such a small book it is jam-packed with all the emotions. It's not really a book about mermaids. It's about the fact that slavers threw pregnant women overboard and nature took over and changed the babies in order for them to survive. It's also about the history of a tortured people and the importance of remembering that history.

I'm not going to say I fully understood what I read as there was just so much packed in there and, to put it plainly, I will never understand the excruciating pain and deep loneliness that slaves were forced to endure. I will say it's a powerfully beautiful book that touches upon the horrors of slavery and the resiliency of those tortured that managed to move on and find inner peace. This is a definite must read.

A story of history, ancestry, and remembrance told through the lens of mermaids descended from enslaved women thrown from ships on their journey over the sea. A truly fascinating internal lore and a compelling cast of characters. It goes way too quickly. I devoured the whole audiobook during my walk this morning.

I really appreciated this work, but I didn't enjoy it. Let me explain. While I was kind of in awe of the IDEA of The Deep (my notes have me saying it's The Giver meets The Little Mermaid- which I still kind of agree with if you accept the fact that the little mermaid was a spoiled teenage brat who was trying to run from responsibility and NOT because she was obsessed with living among the twolegs, although there is a touch of that here), I couldn't stand Yetu. I wanted to strangle her. If Solomon would have written one more time about how Yetu could not handle the responsibility of the Remembering and how much physical pain is caused her, I was going to scream. I get it. Why not ask for help? Instead, she runs away. Fine. But then she acts like a frightened brat in a tidal pool for 100 pages. Finally, there is not so much character growth with Yetu but with the wajinru who figure out what is going on and solve it. Wouldn't it have happened that way if Yetu had said something to begin with? No, it was all “woe is me”. I loved [b:An Unkindness of Ghosts 34381254 An Unkindness of Ghosts Rivers Solomon https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1488470439l/34381254.SY75.jpg 55469636] and I think Aster, who is a goddess, would really lose her patience with Yetu. I know I did. I loved Oori and would read a novel with her backstory in a hot minute. So, I guess I have an idea of what a hero should sound like, and how one should act in a story. I'm glad I read this, but I didn't love it the way I wanted to.