Throwback to when I made a tTierlist Booktube Video ranking all my January Books. Now that you know where this one stands, check out the video to see the rest!
The Written Review:
★★
“What is belonging?” we ask.
She says, “Where loneliness ends.”
Yetu is the only one out of her mermaid tribe that knows their history.
Decades ago, pregnant African slave women were thrown into the ocean and their children are what formed Yetu’s people.
The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude. Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another.
The tragedy, so real and raw, even years later was deemed too much for those people to handle and thus all of the memories were bound up into one individual who will hold onto them until their untimely and early death.
And despite knowing how important Yetu is to her people, she decides that she can no longer endure.
She will find a way out from under the murk – one way or another.
When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton.
Ahhh… I’m not sure what to think.
I’m still on the ever-more elusive hunt for a wonderful and compelling mermaid book.
On the one hand, the concept caught me right away but on the other hand, I often found myself puzzled, lost or confused.
Much of the book had a spoken-history vibe to it – where we get fragments of stories, wisps of legends and a scattered narration throughout.
And while I liked that at the beginning, by the middle/end I was just frustrated with the lack of clarity.
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.
Also, and this may just be me, but I had some serious The Giver vibes with the whole collective-memory-in-exchange-for-a-functional-society thing. It kind of worked and kind of didn’t.
All I know is that I’m still on the hunt for that truly excellent mermaid book.
Miranda Reads 
Hee hee…I read Between the Sea and Stars by Chantal Gadoury, the protagonist is a mermaid. I liked it.
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