In this Sunday’s Sunday Post I mentioned that the recently announced list of 2019 Nebula Awards Finalists had, let’s call it informed, this week’s reviews. Particularly as the titles that make the Nebula list are generally eligible for the Hugo Awards, and the nominations for that are due in three weeks.

So we come to The Deep, a novella that was on multiple “best of” lists at the end of the year and looks to pick up a few more kudos by the time the book world has wrung the last of the juice out of 2019.

The Deep was nothing like what I expected. It is as strange and marvelous as the wide, deep ocean that serves as its setting, It’s as intimate as one singular being’s pain, and as vast as the broad sweep of history.

From one perspective, it is the story of Yetu, the historian of her underwater-dwelling people. From another, it is a reclamation of the holocaust of the African-American experience, that of the deaths and depredations of the slave trade. From a third perspective, it is a parable about the greedy rapine of the seas – and of the land – by those who only see the Earth as a resource to be exploited until it is sucked dry.

As is fitting for a story with so many creators, the narrative is braided so that all of those perspectives bleed into one single story – and yet have arteries that reach into all its corners.

However we come to The Deep, the story is told through the eyes of one particular wajinru, the relatively young Yetu. While Yetu is young, she feels old, at least from her own perspective. Old, worn and tired.

Her people are conditioned to forget all the traumas of their species’ creation and existence. But, as the saying has so often been paraphrased, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It is Yetu’s job, her duty, to remember her people’s past in all of its bloody, grief-stricken and traumatic detail, so that her people can live joyously in the “now”. Once each year, the wajinru gather so that the historian can transmit the entire “Remembrance” to all the people, so that they can hold onto just enough of who they came from to continue as a species.

But at the end of the gathering, Yetu has to take all those memories, centuries of memories, back into herself, burdening herself with the weight of all that history, while unburdening everyone else.

It’s a weight that is killing her, as she loses herself in the pain of the all-too-vivid past and forgets herself in the here and now that is the life of her people. Until it breaks her.

Yetu runs away, leaving her people behind, leaving them lost in those deep memories that she has learned to bear, however badly, and goes off to find herself. To figure out if she even has a self without her burden and her duty.

While Yetu heals, she learns to reconnect with the world, even as her people, roiling under the weight of her burden, nearly destroy it.

Escape Rating A: This story has been presented – and marketed – as fantasy/historical fantasy, and that’s the angle that initially reached out to me as a reader. The Nebulas are awards for science fiction and fantasy, so the voters for that award – the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America – clearly viewed it through that lens as well.

And I’m beginning with that as kind of a distancing mechanism, because this story reached out to me in so many different ways that I’m having a difficult time articulating it.

Yetu’s story as an individual is the most accessible part of the story. She is the lens through which we view her people and their world. Seeing the world through her eyes allows us to view her people as people and not creatures, because the articulation of her thoughts is human enough to allow us to identify with her. While her society’s structure – that she has to remember so that everyone else is allowed to forget – is alien, her difficulties with her portion of that dichotomy resonate with us – even as we wonder if that structure isn’t a double-edged blade aimed at her people’s ability to grow, change and ultimately survive.

Her ability to peer back into the past – to actually live the memories that she holds inside her, allows the reader to see the tragedy that gave birth to her people. That the wajinru, capable of breathing both water and air, were born water-breathing from the bodies of pregnant slave women who were thrown off the slave ships because their pregnancies made them too troublesome, or too ill to survive the horrific conditions they were subjected to.

It’s that history that grounds the story in the past, and reclaims that past as it births an entire species out of that tragedy.

At the same time, the wajinru are also a people of the here and now, and they are under threat by the land-dwelling two-legs who have raped the sea for its abundant life, and now want to suck the resources out of its depths. In order to understand the need to fight back, the wajinru will have to remember their past so that they can protect their future.

And in that, Yetu’s “rebellion” provides a renewal both for herself and her people, giving the story a hopeful, hoped for, and beautiful ending.

I was very excited for this book, but it didn't live up to that excitement. Ultimately, the concept was more interesting than this execution.

Breathtakingly beautiful story of the millions of enslaved Africans who were transported to the America's in during the 16-19th centuries and the lives lost when 1.8 million were tossed overboard.

This novella has an intriguing premise but I just didn’t connect with the writing style. I could never quite picture the setting or understand the character relationships. Disappointing because I really wanted to enjoy this one

I was very interested in the premise. However, I DNF I found it to be very slow. I will try to pick it back up at a later date. I have recommended to others that would enjoy something like this.

Having read Rivers Solomon’s previous book, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and found it to be great on concept and character work but rather wanting for plot, I was very curious about this novella. It’s also worth noting that it was inspired by a song, which was itself inspired by other music and concepts (all of which is explained in the Afterword).

Once again, the concept of The Deep is really great. But it belongs to Solomon only in the sense that it belongs to everybody: the concept is being treated like a collective idea upon which any author or artist can riff!

Beyond that, the characters and the world-building are left intentionally vague. It all hinges on the reader's emotional responses. So if that doesn't work for you, you won't gel with this book. The plot, such as it is, feels like enough to sustain a short story rather than a novella of this length. I was really bored for the first half; I enjoyed the second half more because actual things start happening. All the while I was reading, I had a sense that I was doing homework, but kind of in a good way: it made me think. Actually, this would be an excellent book to assign in High School. Not all teens would be into it, but at least some would have an emotional response and they'd all be forced to think about the African slave trade, and the emotional scars of centuries of racism. Which is what this novella centered on "remembrances" is really all about.

This was an interesting read. Not my usual fare, but I love a good mermaid/ siren story. This was strange, sad, lyrical, and definitely unique in the idea of the story and the telling of it.

Mermaids and generational tales. An original greatly detailed novel with strong characters. History tried to stop their stories but life finds a way through to those that want to hear.

Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher on Netgalley. Thanks! All opinions are my own.

Book: The Deep

Author: Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes

Book Series: Standalone

Rating: 4.5/5

Diversity: LGBT friendly! Main ff romance, mm side romance, intersex, gender fluidity, they/them pronouns! Everyone in this book is Black!

Publication Date: November 5, 2019

Genre: Fantasy

Recommended Age: 17+ (slavery, death, violence, suicide attempt TW, suicide mentions TW, remembering)

Publisher: Saga Press

Pages: 176

Amazon Link

Synopsis: 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.

Review: This book is super unique! I loved how the book was told and I love the premise of this book. It’s a great read and I loved how LGBT friendly this book was! The writing is amazing and it really draws emotions out of you.

However, I did feel like the world building could have been better and that the pacing was very slow. Not necessarily bad things, just things not for me.

Verdict: Definitely recommend this read!

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, 166 pages.
Saga Press (Simon & Schuster), 2019. $20.
Language: PG (3 swears, 0 “f”); Mature Content: PG13; Violence: PG13
BUYING ADVISORY: HS - OPTIONAL
AUDIENCE APPEAL: AVERAGE
Twenty years ago, at age fourteen, Yetu was chosen to be Historian for the wajinru people. She is the only one who has to bear the burden of remembering the atrocities of the past, allowing everyone else to simply enjoy the present, but the past is weighing Yetu down as it steals her future. If something doesn’t change soon, Yetu is sure the past will kill her.
I found this book to be more about providing food for thought than telling a story for enjoyment. As an exploration of the importance of history and of what makes a people, it’s a good book, but, as a story, it’s slow. I started losing interest at about chapter four, finding only a few more scenes between there and the end that caught my attention because they contributed to my pondering the ideas Solomon proposed. The mature content is for discussion of genitals and sex; the violence rating is for brutality, attempted suicide, and war.
Reviewer: Carolina Herdegen

I'm not really sure how to describe The Deep. This book is like someone took some of the better instincts of Erin Morgenstern and crossed them with the worst elements of To Kill a Kingdom. You can see how it could have been good, and then it wasn't.

Picture this, pregnant women who are thrown overboard into the sea during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade whose unborn babies survive, get raised by whales and start an entire society in the deep ocean. THIS WAS COOL. but it does come with both negatives and positives.

On the plus side, the author made a real effort to give the characters some dimensions. Yeah, there were definitely some cliche's, but heroes get to have flaws and the villains aren't one-dimensional idiots. It's a solid and enjoyable story. The plot is engaging and it certainly isn't cookie-cutter fantasy by the numbers. The pacing was for the most part good, although the ending was a bit rushed but this is understandable given how much of the book’s themes are based on the ideas of memory and forgetting, so we have some instances of repetition and the narrative bouncing back and forth and sometimes circling back.
Any way you look at it, The Deep is one dark and gloomy book. And I think for me, that was part of the problem. Don’t get me wrong; I certainly don’t mind at all when my stories are grim and dreary, but still, I need to know why I care. The issue with The Deep is that the author has so successfully painted this world that I really couldn’t have given two hoots about the surrounding politics..

The book is short and the pages turned quickly on a need to know desire. Admittedly, I was a bit confused at the end. I was not entirely sure what happened but I still enjoyed it.

Yetu is the worst historian her people have ever seen. Not that they can remember much, as she holds their memories to them except for the once-a-year Remembrance, when she shares the memories of her people to them. But this year is different. This year, Yetu cannot survive another Remembrance. She won't. This year, she's going to give her people their history back.

This was an excellently thought-out novella highlighting one of the darker parts of history—the slave trade.

And the even darker parts of slavery—the shipping of African people to the Americas. When an enslaved person became too "cumbersome," they were thrown overboard into the Atlantic. The old, infirm, sick and pregnant were cast into the waters to die horrible, drowning deaths, and Solomon has reimagined their deaths into a life, where the children of drowned pregnant women became mermaids.

The history is grim, but the forgetting—and the forcing of memory onto one person who relives that history over and over and over—prevents true healing and overcoming. Instead, the wajinru, the mermaid people of the drowned, live happy lives of oblivion. There's an analogy there, but I'm too dense to tease it out right now.

I did like Yetu, who was an autistic-seeming mermaid, where she felt everything too much and became overwhelmed and overcome by the memories and the sensations of the ocean. And was also possibly demi-sexual (along with Oori), which was fantastic queer rep!

Anywho, I did like this, but ultimately I wanted more of the relationship with the humans and life on the surface. The story is set 60o years after the start of the slave trade, putting the timeline into our almost future, and apparently there were the Tide Wars (or something like that) fought between surface-dwellers and the wajinru, but this future history was hazy at best.

It's definitely an interesting read, although I did also want more hints of climate change in this near-future and how it affected the wajinru and their forgetful existence. And how it affected the humans on land (and the constant plastic?).

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

Pregnant African slave women had been thrown overboard during the slave trade, and their descendants survive on at the bottom of the ocean. Yeti, always sensitive and anxious, is the Historian of her people. She carries the memories of all the generations, allowing the rest of her people to live in the day to day happily. Once a year she shares the memories of the past with them, but it's been taking a toll on her psyche and destroying her. This year, she seeks to escape this responsibility, finding the world that had been left behind.

This is a tale that speaks on many different levels, and one that I feel I would get more out of if I knew more about African cultures. There are still plenty of themes to delve into, primarily about identity. Who is Yeti if she leaves her people and wanders on her own? Who is she without the weight of hundreds of years of memories? Can she truly be happy if alone? What is identity without memory? This is especially a question of trauma, because Yeti is anxious to start with, sensitive to the sounds and pressures around her, and it worsens when she holds her peoples' collective trauma. It isolates her further because no one can understand her despair, and the urging to just be happy only makes her feel that much more alone. The connections she does eventually make are with those who understand trauma because they carry it as well.

This novella written by Rivers Solomon is based on an EDM concept album by Drexciya, then a song by the group Clipping, who are the other listed authors. This explains the almost melodic and rhythmic way the story is told, with memory bleeding into the present. The shifting I-you-we points of view show how enmeshed the past and present can be with the memories in this novel, and it's only by fully embracing the past for what it was, the terrible and horrible bits as well as the pretty and fun parts, that all of the people can move on. That's a poignant lesson to learn, and made me feel a little disappointed at the end because there's so much more that could be part of the story! But if anything, it matches that energy of a song. The hopeful note at the end promises more to come, but the characters will all have to earn it for themselves.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was a bit different to get into but the main character sucked me in and I had to find out what happened next. You felt for the people and understood why they did what they were doing. There was an afterward by clipping that explained the history of where the book came from and the previous versions of this. I ended up listening to the music by Drexciya after reading the afterward with my kids and thoroughly enjoyed that too. The song by clipping is on my to listen to list now. Overall a great read that seems completely plausible

DNF in the first few chapters. I wasn't jiving with the writing style at the time. But I am still genuinely interested in the story line so I plan to pick this back up at a later time.

This is an interesting concept but I'm conflicted. On one hand this is an imagined world so the only "rules" are really up to the creator. On the other hand, this imagined world has a historical connection to the real one, which means the reader can't just suspend all disbelief. The fact that evolution doesn't work like that kept intruding on my enjoyment. If new humanoid species can arise because humans wish it, how come the reverse isn't true? Why can't a Wajinru turn into or birth a two-leg because they wish it? Other than this little qualm, this universe is beautiful and the descriptions very cinematic. These are my own opinions, thank you for this copy.

An incredible fairy tale/speculative fiction story imagining an incredible world in the depths of the ocean where the ocean spirits transformed extreme cruelty during the transatlantic slave trade into an amazing new kind of life. Far more complex than the average mermaid, the beings in the story are intricately created as a blend of human and sea creature with astonishing world building and inner logic. The plot centered on Yetu, made to shoulder all of the memories of her people pulls in social and historical context with our world and the way that collective societal memory harms and shapes us all.

2.9 / 5 ✪

https://arefugefromlife.wordpress.com/2019/11/29/

The Deep is an unique novella based on a species of mere-people originally descended from the children of slave mothers who were thrown overboard when it was found that they were pregnant. Along with reminding people of a terrible history—this novella blends such history fluidly with the present, as Yetu remember her people’s origins among the two-legs. While it was thought-provoking and uniquely based, the story is complicated by strange, almost random glimpses into the past, and a vague and detail-poor present. The mere-people live in a colorless world—which is mostly what I thought of this read. Interesting, but ultimately colorless.

Yetu holds the memories of her people. As a child, she was incredibly sensitive to the ocean around her. To voices, to feelings, to the temperature and flow of the waters. As the Historian of the Zoti Aleyu (meaning “strange fish”), Yetu contains the sum of their memories of old; all the pain, the suffering, the brief moments of hope and love between. The other Zoti Aleyu live in blissful ignorance, free of the pain from before. Since she took over as Historian, her life has become a nightmare. Lost in Remembrance, she has withered away. Nearly died on a increasing frequency. She is in constant pain, and seeks to shut out the world—and her own kind—as much as possible.

Yet the Aleyu cannot sustain themselves completely free of memories. Once a year the Historian must host a group Remembrance for all, during which she must guide them through the memories before ultimately leaving them to digest and interpret. But soon after the Historian must take up the mantle once more, and remember for her people.

But instead Yetu flees. She escapes to the surface where she learns an important lesson, something that may yet save the Aleyu and Yetu herself. All she must do is survive long enough to use it.

The story is very interesting at first, though it takes a few detours early on. And then later. But the Zoti Aleyu ultimately proved fascinating. When the focus was on them, I didn’t really have any issues with the text. Honestly, if you just want to read something entirely new and interesting, skip the rest of this and read the book. Otherwise… well, the rest of this will be less flattering.

The story occasionally switches between the past and present, sometimes seemingly at random. One of the later times it does this for no reason that I can tell, doing little to nothing in setting up the finale. Other times it’s to reveal snippets of the Zoti Aleyu’s history—stories that often fail to tell enough, revealing bits and pieces for the reader to interpret for themselves. Other events of importance are told in full: their birth as a species, for example. But too many details are left out or lost. The world runs by in a blur. The parts we are shown are lacking, incomplete, colorless. The Remembrances especially, though even the present is often left wanting, with the plot itself vague or unclear.

My biggest issue with the story is, well, the story. The Deep can’t ultimately figure out what it is. At first it doesn’t much matter, but at about the halfway point, a love story is introduced. And then the story splits. This throws off the pacing, the focus and the flow. From then on, I wasn’t sure where the plot would lead as this romance competes with the Aleyu’s history. Now, this can be a good thing, when done well, as it keeps the reader guessing. Sadly, this is not done well. And since the story never really decides what it is, what story it is telling, the ending was ultimately unsatisfying. Now, this may be due to the sheer number of authors involved in the writing of it—one trying to tell Yetu’s story while the others focus on that of the Aleyu. It is said that too many cooks spoil the broth. Too many authors may take a good idea but get carried away in the writing, all while losing sight of the story they set out to tell.

TL;DR

The Deep is an interesting and unique story with quite the premiss and an amazing lead. It is also unfocused, bland, with an unsatisfying conclusion and strange, often random flashbacks. Though it never decides which story it ultimately wants to tell, the two plots competing one another all the way to the end, it’s thought-provoking and new, something you’ve likely not seen before. Combined with a terrible, eye-opening history of the world (like, the actual world), it’s… I dunno. Can’t decide if it’s a must-read or something to skip. Dunno if I’d pay $10 for the unique vision bereft of a real resolution. I’ve read enough glowing reviews to offset my neutral one, so there’s a decent chance you’ll love it. But, I didn’t. So… your call.

The Deep is a beautiful, haunting, and stunning novella that was inspired by a song of the same name. That song was produced by the rap group Clipping for the This American Life episode "We Are In The Future" and received a Hugo Award nomination.

Yetu holds all the memories of the wajniru. That is her role as historian for her people. She feels overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility. During the annual ceremony that provides her a few days respite, Yetu fears she is being destroyed from within and tries to escape. As she recovers from her flight, she discovers the world her people left behind. It is in these interactions with others that she can begin to reclaim and own not only her past, but the future of her people.

Everything about this novella-- the world, the characters, the plot, and the pain is remarkable making it a must (re)read.

I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher Saga Press for allowing me to receive this E-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

The Deep
by Rivers Solomon; Daveed Diggs; William Hutson; Jonathan Snipes

I just want to gush about this short novella so much!! The storytelling and power that comes through this are inspiring!! It is something that has its roots in a dark tragedic history that brings it to the forethought of today's world while also adding a beautiful fantastical story to history. I highly recommend this book firstly because of the writing and impact that it has but secondly, it is only 176 pages... You have time to pick this one up! So good!

5 Stars A+ <3