Rating: 4/5
Yetu holds the memories for her people.
Her people, the wajinru – water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slavers – live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one. Save the historian.
Yetu remembers for all the wajinru, and the memories – painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so she flees to the surface, escaping the memories and the expectations and the responsibilities – and discovers a world the wajinru 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 identities – and own who they really are.
I read Solomon’s other book, Sorrowland which I found beautifully disturbing. The Deep had already been on my list so once I realized it was the same author. I couldn’t wait to see what this would entail.
This gives us a unique and dark take on the existence of mermaids. And the entire novel we spend learning about their history, the way they live, how they came to be.
This had me captivated from the start, but the writing style often left me confused, needing to reread passages to finally understand what was happening. Being only 150 pages, I expected this to be a fairly quick read, but its complexity proved otherwise.
This story isn’t told in a straight timeline either. We jump around a lot learning snippets of the mermaids' history through memories and stories. This adds to the confusion as we the reader have to determine where we are in the timeline.
But despite being a more complex read, I truly did find this a beautifully told story. The premise of how these mermaids came into existence and how they’ve lived in the deep water was still very alluring.
If you enjoy tales of mermaids, definitely consider picking this one up!
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