I wanted to love this novella, especially since it focuses on the slave history and the accompanied horrors and trauma, but I could not get past the way it was presented: in a fantastical world of mermaids and other sea creatures. I get the premise and the reasoning behind it, and I applaud Solomon et al. for the creativity and novelty of such presentation, but something missed the mark for me - perhaps it needed to be expanded?

I view The Deep as a story designed to provide therapy for historical trauma. The Middle Passage is the stretch of the Atlantic Ocean at the heart of the journey of ships participating in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade from Africa. Atrocities beyond imagining occurred as millions of humans were stacked in holds of those ships with no light, little food and no care to be taken too European colonies as enslaved labor. Many died from disease. Often, they were thrown overboard alive when the slavers realized they would not recoup their investment. Many drowned or were eaten by sharks. Some committed suicide to escape the horrors of being raped and abused or giving birth to children who had nothing to look forward to but the bleak future of being enslaved, and unbearable emotional trauma of being stolen from their homeland. I did some research, and almost two million people died as a consequence of the Middle Passage. The level of trauma and horror about those events lies heavy on the minds of many whose ancestors almost assuredly were enslaved, and truthfully, it should be horrifying to every human being.

The Deep reimagines the consequences of the Middle Passage. Instead of all of those people dying, some become different. The magic of the water changes them into beings who are at home in the deep. This transformation occurs in the womb, affecting the unborn. They establish colonies deep in the waters. Specific members of their society are selected to revisit and retell the memories of their ancestors and to guide the people through their remembrance. It is extremely taxing for the memory keeper. Yetu is the latest, and she finds her role nearly intolerable, bringing her to a difficult choice. Should she continue to bear this impossible burden for the good of her people, or seek an escape for her own survival?

The Deep is an adaptation of an award-winning song by rap group Clipping called “We Are in the Future.” The audiobook was nominated by actor/musical artist Daveed Diggs, who is a member of the group. I enjoyed his narration. He has a soothing voice that kept me listening. However, I can’t say I enjoyed this book. It is a traumatic read, yet an important read. Important history that needs to be remembered is highlighted in this book. I appreciate the value of that. Having said that, admittedly, this feel like a chore to read and I didn’t enjoy listening to this book very much. I did like the romance between Yetu and a fisherwoman she meets, and I liked the ending and the meaning behind this story. It’s a short read, and I would recommend it in the sense that again, it’s an important retelling of a true historical tragedy that imparts a sense of hope where only despair would live. I would say that reading this as a mermaid story alone is not going to engender that sense of enjoyment for fans of the legendary creature. Instead, it’s focused on what could be based on what was lost. The mermaid folklore is used as a device to speculate on how the deliberate murder of enslaved peoples could have led to their evolution into a new kind of water dweller. It also has some vital themes about community, self-sacrifice, self-love, and loving and valuing others.

Overall rating: <b>3.5/5.0 stars</b>.

Eerie and deep (no pun intended) but maybe a little abstract, especially if one isn't familiar with the inspiration/context before the fact.

While I was very intrigued by the premise of this book and impressed with the experimental nature of the writing, overall I struggled reading it. For me personally, this may have been more suited to a short story than to a full novel. That said, I am glad that I read it - sometimes you need to be shaken out of the traditional storytelling format.

I'm glad I read up about this one before I read it, because I think it helped listening to the song the book is based on to really get a feel for it going in. I loved this story and marked many pages for its attention to mental health, navigating duty and responsibility, and the real effects of trauma and pain passed on through generations. Gave me so much to think about and was so glad Solomon was the one to write it.

This book was such an interesting take on a fantastical creature story. I appreciated Solomon's writing. I will be sharing this with my school's short fiction class.

I loved everything about this slim book. The writing is gorgeous, the characters are gorgeous, the ideas are gorgeous. I'm a new, big fan of Solomon after this.

I enjoyed the premise and the folklore but did not find it emotionally engaging or interesting enough to give a higher rating. It seems like four authors could have fleshed out this novella into a full novel.

I tried hard to truly love this, but I'm going with a 3.75 star rating. I enjoyed the world and idea behind slaves turning into mermaids, but I couldn't truly connect to this at all. I did enjoy Yetu as a character and how she explored mental health. I loved that she was non-binary. I loved the cute romance.

Yetu was the historian for her people in which she alone carried all the memories of her kind -- all the gruesome, heartbreaking details. She gets caught up in the memories of her ancestors which causes her to lose her identity. During the Remembrance she decides to run away from her duty so that she can live.

I love that this book really focused on mental health in black people and about history and how it should not make us lose sight of ourselves. I read this book and I also listened to the audiobook. The audiobook itself is a definite 4 star as it drew me in.

Overall, it was a good short read.

The Deep

I Picked Up This Book Because: Daveed Diggs!

The Characters:

Yetu (memory keeper):

The Story:

This was an interesting tale. Very layered. I'm not the most analytical reviewer so I don't have much to say about that but I did enjoy the story. The characters were fresh and interesting.

The Random Thoughts:



The Score Card:



3.5 Stars

This was such a wonderful and interesting book! I absolutely love books that take a point in history and completely flip it and that's exactly what The Deep does. Beautifully written and a story that will not only stick with you, but it will keep you thinking.

This was everything I expected. It was entrancing and lyrical, sweeping you under with the flow of the story, and gave a wonderful new twist to the mythos of mermaids.

A really interesting premise, but the story felt a little thin, and there was some ambiguity that I found frustrating.

I didn't love this book the way I hoped I would. I've read "Unkindness of Ghosts", also by this author, and thought it spoke to some very painful and difficult themes in a deep way. The author's prose can be a bit rough, but her ideas pulled me through.

This book's prose is also a bit rough, but I didn't attach to the story in the same way. The idea of the book is that Yetu, the historian for a community of merfolk, is the only person who holds on to their race memory. She shares this memory once a year with her people and then takes the memories back. This system is in place because a distant ancestor of Yetu's thought that it would be best if her people didn't have to hold on to the pain of how their race came to be.

And how their race came to be is quite painful. These people are the descendants of the unborn babies of pregnant women who were sold into slavery and then tossed into the sea in the Middle Passage, either because they rebelled or because they were dead. Some of these babies were born in the sea and salvaged by whales, and eventually became Yetu's people.

Thinking about it, this whole story is part of why I didn't attach to the book. As I write it like this, it seems fabulous and poignant. Unfortunately, the author ended up putting a lot of detail into this origin story to its detriment. I think that for a fantasy story like this, if you put in too much detail a reader like me will start to pick it apart. Can whales really suckle children? How did they meet each other and form a society? How did language work? How does this voluntary giving up and receiving back of memory work exactly, because the first merfolk didn't do it? I ended up asking too many questions.

I also had a hard time attaching to Yetu. A huge theme of this book was pain. Yetu is in deadly pain from holding on to memories that are toxic. She's at the end of her rope, so much so that she finally runs away right after she has left her people in the throes of these very memories. Yetu could have been responsible for the destruction of her whole race had things gone a bit differently. I understand her drive to save herself and I understand that no matter how much she explained, no on understood what she was going through. This frustrated me- the author backed Yetu into a corner where all she could do was abandon everyone she knew and loved. I felt like there was something right under the surface there that was never addressed. What do we owe the past and what do we owe each other because of that past? How are we diminished by not acknowledging the pain of the past? How are we abandoning those who know that past by refusing to acknowledge it? Really interesting questions that were never spelled out in this book. Maybe the author didn't want to spoon feed her readers that much. It left me frustrated, though, because the characters in the book only address the issue of the past in simple or superficial ways.

As I write this review, I find that I'm teasing out a lot of interesting questions that's making me think better of the book. However, the reading experience itself was frustrating. That's sort of the nature of reading this author, I'm finding.

3 Stars - I recommend if you are looking for a unique fantasy novel.

Wow, first of all, what a unique concept for a fantasy novel. It pulled me in immediately, and the history gives a second meaning to the story that follows. I was very interested in the world that was created and the magic of their history as well. I connected to Yetu's anxiety and overwhelm, but did have a hard time relating to her journey within the novel. While it was very interesting, and short, I didn't find myself having trouble putting it down. It had sort of a slow pace, that I was having trouble connecting with at this time. The way everything came together in the end was very satisfying and and felt relatively powerful. I will say, even with as much as a romance lover as I am... I don't think this story needed the romance. The connections that were made could have been achieved in other ways. I'm not against it, but it felt like a little bit of an afterthought, or an extra. Overall this this book is a really interesting new piece of fantasy. I recommend it if you are looking for something different and engaging.

This book is very imaginative and descriptive, but it is just not my genre. That doesn't mean someone won't enjoy the story, but I just couldn't get into the world that was created.

This was a really intriguing novella, but alas, I was more compelled by the idea and inherent themes than I was by the story itself. The origin story is fascinating as well - I had no idea that this was developed with the help of Drexciya's entire oeuvre as well as a Clipping song (now I have to go listen!).

The worldbuilding was a bit too sparse for me, but I also get that it was probably intentional, as it wasn't really the point. I thought there were some really interesting musings on the weight of intergenerational trauma and the importance of historical memory, and I was delighted by the unexpected queer romance that emerged!

Also the afterword was incredible. Not only is it super well-written, it gives the story so much more depth, knowing just how it was brought to life!

This was such a wonderful and important book. It has such a complex and beautiful message told in an incredibly interesting way. The ways that it explored trauma and the burden of carrying it made me feel very emotional. Rivers Solomon is a very talented writer, being able to pack such a layered and impactful messages into such a small amount of pages.

“Who each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together.”

Yetu is wajinru, a people descended from pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave traders. Living an idyllic, utopian life protected by the sea, the wajinru have for centuries guarded the knowledge of their traumatic past in a way that protects the majority: by appointing a Historian, one who holds all the memories of their History with the exception of the yearly Remembrance ceremony, where all wajinru come together for a few days to share this knowledge. But the price of their “freedom” from this knowledge the rest of the year is the mental health and life of the Historian. And Yetu, the currently appointed one, knows that she cannot last much longer in this role. The pain of holding the knowledge alone is too much for her. She must decide whether to allow herself the peace of mind that was stolen from her or sacrifice herself for the whole of her people. But in her journey to answer that question, she and the wajinru realize that there may be another path, one in which they can all reclaim their past and own who they are.

For such a slim little book, this novella holds multitudes. Before I get into the deeper things (ummm, pun intended?) I want to mention a few things. One is the writing. It’s a very different style of book from Solomon’s first, but I have to say I thought the polish on the writing definitely makes it clear that it’s not their first. There were some plot points and descriptions that left me a little lost in Unkindness (though I got through it fine with a little willing suspension of disbelief), and while this didn’t have quite the same scope, so it may be an apples and oranges comparison, I didn’t have that issue here. Everything, from the plot to the character development to the mechanisms of memory passing and communication, felt polished and smooth. The writing itself had a flow and rhythm that fit the philosophical nature of the topics it covered, complemented with a sparse-ness and to the point delivery that fit the harsh realities of those same topics. Also, I want to point out the idea of this novella – the general concept of pregnant slave women who were thrown overboard into the sea whose children were born from their wombs and into an ocean that welcomed them and showed them how to breath underwater, whose creatures both killed and protected them, and where their discarded lives created a home and community where they were safe and sheltered – it’s incredible. And I read the afterward, I know that it was a combination of efforts, a idea that began before Solomon came to it and will continue to grow after this novella, but I am a book person, a reading person, and this is the format where the idea was most likely to sink its claws into me. And oh my goodness, sink them it did. I just cannot get over it – how beautiful and hopeful it is, despite the horror and tragedy from which it was born. As I said, incredible.

And now, my attempt to address and review the focal topic of this little book: the potent cumulative, intergenerational effects of trauma. The philosophical explorations of the original wajinru and their decision to protect the whole from the trauma of the past by assigning the responsibility of remembering it to a single entity in juxtaposition with Yetu’s personal journey to find out who she is for herself, separate from the memories of the past, are extraordinary. There is equal time given to the benefits and potential pitfalls of all sides of remembering history: from the way the pain of remembering everything can overwhelm you (as Yetu feels) to the equally painful reality of losing all of the past, having no knowledge of where you came from (as Oori, the confidant Yetu meets while struggling with escaping her role/people or swimming back to it, feels). There is pain in remembering, but there is also power. There are terrible memories, visceral in their horror, but there is also hope and goodness. Both are important perspectives, and the all or nothing options forced upon Yetu and Oori at both extremes are heart-breaking. And then Solomon brings it all together in the end with a gorgeous message about the importance of community in History and Remembrance, of sharing the burden (because our past is part of who we are, and should be honored, but also does not have to fully define us), and of the possibility for collective healing and a more balanced future.

If there was ever a doubt that fairy tales or fantasy are a useful way to address complicated and abstract reality-based topics in truly beneficial ways, The Deep is here to disabuse you of said doubt. This is a such a striking novella in so many ways, from the creativity of its story to the intensity and cutting commentary of its message. Its short length belies the strength in its pages. There is no way my words could do justice to what Solomon has crafted. If there is open communication and real healing to be found in words, Solomon is well along the path to finding it, to making it. Magnificent.

I marked so many quotes and passages. Enjoy these:

“One can only go for so long without asking, who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean?”

“She didn’t mean to be so cruel, but what else was she to do with all the violence inside of her?”

“Forgetting was not the same as healing.”

“Remember how deep we go.”

“Without your history, you are empty.”

“‘What is belonging?’ we ask. She says, ‘Where loneliness ends.’”

“We have absorbed many lifetimes of pain, but it is no matter compared to the good.”

“But connection came with responsibility. Duty choked independence and freedom.”

“If the past is full of bad things, if a people is defined by the terror done to them, its good for it to go, don’t you think?”

“Doesn’t it hurt not to know who you are?”

“‘But your whole history. Your ancestry. That’s who you are.’ […] ‘No. I am who I am now. Before, I was no one. When you’re everyone in the past, and when you’re for everyone in the present, you’re no one. Nobody. You don’t exist.”

“…if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was that point? Nothingness was a fate worse than pain. […] At least with pain there was life, a chance at change and redemption.”

“Our shared fury makes us stronger. We continue to rise.”

“She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.”

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

First things first, I keep waffling between 3.5 and 4 stars for this book. I don’t tend to give out half stars and I usually round up on Goodreads, so I went with four stars. And yet… I don’t know if it quite reaches a four. I feel like this is because my feelings about this book are very much confused.

This is the story of the wajinru, a race of ocean-dwelling people who are the descendants of pregnant slave women who were tossed overboard during the journey across the Atlantic. Our main character is Yetu, who is the current Historian for the wajinru. It is the Historian’s job to carry all the memories of the wajinru’s past so that everyone doesn’t have to suffer under the weight of their tragic beginnings. It’s a position of importance, but it is taking a toll on Yetu. When the time of year comes where Yetu can shed the memories to share them with her people, she takes the opportunity to swim as far away as she can. On her journey, she learns more about her past and how to reclaim her people’s history to ensure their future.

I will say that I enjoyed reading this novella. The writing was evocative and raw, bringing up emotions that I was not prepared for. It speaks to tragedy and how it can define a whole community. But it also speaks to how we shouldn’t let tragedy be our only defining factor. There is a lot of back and forth in this book. You can see how carrying the wajinru history is destroying Yetu and you can understand why she would want to be rid of it. But you can also see how lost a person can become without a sense of where they come from. There’s a lot to unpack with this book.

And… honestly… I think that might be my issue with this book. Well, not the fact that there’s a lot to unpack, but the fact that there’s a lot to unpack in only 166 pages! I felt like the topics in this narrative would have benefited from a more substantial book. Though The Deep is a wonderfully written story, it felt almost superficial. I personally just wish it would have been longer!

Final thoughts: This was a beautifully crafted novella that tackles some very intense subjects. The writing is powerful but the length left me feeling like something was missing. I wanted more!