The Deep is a fantasy novel about the descendants of African slave women thrown overboard into the sea by slave owners. Pregnant women were thrown overboard for being "sick and disruptive cargo," but what would have happened if their babies adapted to the new environment and survived anyways? The zoti are the answer to this "what if." They are born from the bodies of women thrown overboard, but rather than having legs they have tails and can breathe underwater. They do not remember where they came from, as it is too painful for them to remember. Only Yetu is cursed with being the Historian. She is overcome by the pain of the History, of all the horrific memories of the first zoti and of the women thrown overboard. She barely remembers who she is, and she cannot rid herself of the History lest the rest of her people suffer as she does with the memories. But one day, she can't take it anymore, and flees to the surface. She leaves the rest of her people in the process of the Remembering, the yearly pain of the memories coming to the surface again, and she flees to discover herself outside of the painful memories of the ancestors.

I came into this novel expecting a hard-hitting dark fantasy book that mixed history with the secrets of the ocean in a beautiful way. What I read was a confusing story that jumped around in time, where I was never sure of who was speaking. Sometimes the POV only referred to the main character as "We", sometimes the POV was clearly from Yetu, and sometimes I could never tell who was speaking at all. I kept reading hoping that things would clear themselves up by the end of the story, but they didn't. The book was so short that I never truly felt any connection to Yetu or her people, and I couldn't figure out how the side characters were even important to the story at all.

One thing that confused me the most in this story was Yetu's multiple (?) love interests. I could not tell whose POV the story was supposed to be being told from at the time, but Yetu was with a male side character, and then she was talking to and seemed to be romantically interested in a female character Oori. I am not completely sure if it was even Yetu with the male character, as that occurred during a POV switch where the only pronoun being used was "we." But it made the story confusing to read as it seemed like Yetu was with both this male character and the female character at the same time, just going back and forth between the two. This is simply one example of something that didn't add up within the story.

I also couldn't understand why the other zoti didn't understand why Yetu was in such pain being the Historian. She was cursed with the Rememberings constantly, and she had to lead them through their own Rememberings as well, so why didn't they understand her pain. They were clearly in pain during the Rememberings, so why was it so difficult for them to understand that this was how she felt all the time?

The only part that I did like about this book was the dark fantasy aspect. I was horrified by the description of the zoti helping the newborn zoti out of the bodies of their dead mothers, but I loved how it was described and how the instant connection was made from this horrific real world to the underwater fantasy one. I also did enjoy reading some of the flashbacks of history, even though I felt like they could have been expanded on.

If this book had been longer and focused on Yetu's story alone, I believe I would have really enjoyed it. If the book had been this length and been a collection of short stories from the Rememberings without trying to connect the main plot of Yetu, I believe I would have enjoyed that as well. But as this story was written, it feels more like a hodge-podge of information than a coherent tale, and I could not recommend it.

I received an advance copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.

Solomon turned an award winning song into quite an interesting novel. He creates a world where the offspring of pregnant African slaves thrown overboard adapt to life underwater as mermaids calling themselves Wanjiru. They have to come to terms with their own existence and how they came into the world. This is a thought-provoking, engaging, contemporary novel that will insight many discussions to come.

It was beautifully written almost lyrical. This is the type of story that makes you think about what would you do in that situation. I enjoyed reading this and would purchase this for my collection.

**3.5-stars**
What the heck did I just read?
This novella is so unique. The feeling.
Gah! I can't even describe it.
When I first finished this book, I was blown away but also didn't really understand what I had read. Overtime, the initial feeling of overwhelming joy has petered out.
In fact, I remember very little about this. Considering the fact that I completed it just 4-days ago, seems a bit of an issue to me.
While I respect the beautiful nature of this story, the question remains, what was this? Whilst reading, I was overwhelmed with feelings that I was being told some wise and ancient lore, unfortunately I think the true meaning of it sailed well over my head.
I do appreciate the creation of this story and I would even read it again someday, it's just a hard one to grasp. Absolutely moving though, even if you don't fully understand why it is slowly ripping your heart out of your chest.
In short, I would need to read this again before I can provide more thoughts. Something I would most definitely be willing to do. Thank you so much to the publisher, Saga Press, for sending me a copy to read and review. I truly appreciate the opportunity!

The afterword states that the plan was to do a “telephone game” version of a book. So you have quite a few voices each telling one piece of the origins of a merpeople inhabiting an ocean world. The base of the tale is that the wajinru came into being when pregnant captives were flung off slave ships during the middle passage from Africa to the Americas. The mothers of course perished but the babies were born alive already knowing how to breathe in water (because of the womb) and the ocean blessing them with fins and scales.

Possibilities, such possibilities for all kinds of wondrous narrative. Not to be because there are no defined characters, except for Yetu who is a historian burdened with remembering all of the pain of her people, no plot, and disrupted pacing. Heavy on magical realism and abstract symbolism, I wasn’t able to grasp a genuine world or a consistent timeline. I know the importance of what they were trying to do but it just didn’t come together. When Rivers Solomon takes over, and you can feel the strength of her writing when she does, it takes off. Too bad that she couldn’t have taken the collective’s ideas to create one cohesive, powerful book.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Saga Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1534439863

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD




Yetu is the historian for the wajniru, underwater beings created when slave traders threw pregnant African women overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. Although the women drowned, their children, born in the deep of the ocean, were transformed and have founded their own underwater society. As historian, Yetu carries the memories of all the trauma the mothers of the wajniru and the succeeding generations alone, to protect the others, and has done so for sixteen years, suffering tremendously from taking the burden alone. Once a year, she gets a three day respite from the memories when the wajniru hold a Rememberance ceremony. At that time, she carefully lets the memories wash back into the entire population so they can feel it collectively. The experience is physically as well as emotionally traumatic-- author Rivers Solomon describes it as a seizure-- but all the wajniru go through it together, and once they have absorbed the memories and can take no more, Yetu takes them back. Carrying all the history, violence, and trauma of her people has emotionally, mentally, and physically damaged and weakened Yetu, and since she has been carrying these memories since she was a teenager, they have overwhelmed her ability to establish her own identity. This time, after giving the wajinru's memories back to them, Yetu decides to escape so she does not have to take on their pain again and can have an opportunity to discover who she really is. 

Swimming to the surface of the ocean, away from her kind, Yetu is injured and washed into a tide pool. Thanks to nearby humans, and especially the prickly Oori, she begins to heal. An awkward friendship develops between Oori and Yetu, out of discussions about the ocean, family, and the past. Oori, the last of her people, does not know her history, and the fact that Yetu gave hers up is upsetting to her and causes Yetu to rethink whether she can really develop an identity without any knowledge of her history. It becomes clear to her that the increasingly stormy weather is probably due to the wajinru's group anguish and that she must return to them to retrieve their history. 

This story powerfully brings the point home about the physical, mental, and emotional effects of generational trauma that many Black people still experience, even generations after the end of slavery. The situation that created the wajinru is also not the only negative impact the "two-legs" have on them, even down in the deep of the ocean, as drilling for oil not only has a negative impact on the environment but causes the violent deaths of enough of the wajinru that they rise up to wash it away in a tidal wave.  The Deep is not fast paced, as for much of it Yetu is trapped in a tide pool, but it is a story that can be felt deep in the gut. 

The Deep is the third iteration of storytelling based on the premise of an aquatic people born from drowned pregnant African women kidnapped to be enslaved(although each version can stand on its own).  A musical duo called Drexciya first imagined it, and their music created a mythology for an underwater utopia born from this terrible oppression. The hip-hop group clipping then wrote their own musical version, "The Deep", a haunting song about underwater beings who rise as a collective against the "two-legs" after they begin drilling for oil, leading to dramatic climate change and destruction of the oceans, that won a Hugo Award for best dramatic performance. This novella takes the repeated line "y'all remember" from clipping's song and focuses on the effects of history and collective memory that follow the uprising, While I'm not familiar with Drexciya, both clipping's song and Solomon's novella tell powerful, complementary stories about the violence and horror caused by white supremacy and enviromental destruction. Recommended. 


I received this as a complimentary ARC from Saga Press through NetGalley

A combination of folklore and fantasy brewed alongside a healthy dose of “What If…”, "The Deep" is a tale of the water-breathing descendants of African women who were tossed overboard during the slave trade travels and adapted to survive. Interestingly, "The Deep", by Rivers Solomon, is a large survival metaphor of the endurance all Africans underwent during the devastations of slavery.

Solomon’s narrative is confusing at times, yet also beautifully dream like.

That narrative, with one fin exclusively swimming in the tides of fantasy with all its fantastically unpronounceable names, focuses on Yetu, a historian for an undersea community that calls itself Wajinru. Yetu is a dreamer and prefers to live more in a shamanistic dreamlike state rather than deal with the current, ahem, current. This is where Solomon’s talent is the strongest. The word play floats and bubbles along. The dialogue, unfortunately, becomes a sinking anchor at times as the lyrical nature cedes to mere genre-speak. An interlude remembering – even foreshadowing – war with those nasty surface dwellers, which is meant to build as an integral action-piece, also drowns into a mono drumbeat whose rhythm is never solidly established.

Solomon works at building a beautiful society and a caring character, one that can be read as an imaginary tale or as a sad allegory. When Yetu flees from her home in an impulse of surrendering all responsibilities, however, the lore begins to drift. Yetu’s plight becomes well documented but the equally-compelling Wajinru are mostly lost in the wake.


Many thanks to NetGalley and Saga Press / Simon and Schuster for the award of a preview copy.

The Deep is kind of unique in that it is a book inspired by a song: "The Deep" by clipping..  I've included it below in case you'd like to take a listen.  The Deep is about Yetu, who belongs to a race of creatures that live beneath the surface of the sea, the Wajinru.  They are descendants of pregnant African slave women who were thrown overboard by slave owners.

The pain of the Wajinru people goes so deep, they cannot bear to remember these events more than once a year, at an event they call The Remembering.  In the mean time, the memories are held by one single Wajinru, the Historian.  For now, that historian is Yetu.

But Yetu is overwhelmed by these memories.  They are drowning her, killing her, even with how painful they are.  Sometimes she becomes so lost in these memories she cannot eat, she cannot sleep.  She wishes she were dead.  Yetu is determined to get rid of the memories.

The writing is beautiful.  The way the world beneath the surface of the sea is described is perfectly haunting, the cold currents, the whale song, the way the light pierces the surface.  It's everything I would hope for in a book that is set in the sea.

I also loved the world building and history of the Wajinru people.  How they learned language, how they rescued their kin from the water, how they explored the sea and passed along their memories.  Although this novella is relatively short, there is a lot to digest.

At it's core, it's a story about memory and history.  How important it is to carry on those memories, to not forget about where you come from.  How memories outlive us and persist beyond time, how an entire culture can be erased with no one to remember it.

Despite it's dark premise, The Deep was a story full of hope.  People uniting, overcoming a painful history together, sharing the burden.  I read The Deep in just a day, and I'd recommend the story to anyone interested in the premise.

The Deep released on November 5, 2019 and can be found on GoodReads or ordered on Amazon. Thank you to Saga Press and NetGalley for the eARC provided in exchange for review.

Excerpted to the relevant portion from full article linked below:

Yetu, on the other hand, is a more likeable, hopeful protagonist. Burdened with not only the memories of her people, but also a sensitivity to the presence of others that makes her prefer solitude, Yetu isn’t sure she’ll be able to survive the next Remembering. During the ritual, she passes all the memories back to the other wajinru, so that they can all take part in their history, so that they know who they are. Without the Remembering, the wajinru begin to forget themselves; in their day to day lives, they easily dismiss past transgressions, forgetting them almost immediately after they happen. But if they forget easily, they also crave knowledge of who they are, something restored to them only in the Remembering. For a few blissful days, Yetu will be free of the other memories, existing only as herself. But taking back the memories will kill her, she is certain, and so Yetu flees, leaving her people in the throes of memory.

Although the act may seem selfish, it’s clear to the reader that it’s an act of self-preservation. When she lands in a shallow pond at the surface, at the mercy of the surface dwellers (who care for her as she heals), it takes developing a real friendship for Yetu to begin to view her own people in a kinder fashion. Yetu wants to believe that the wajinru will be able to handle the memories and the pain; ultimately, when the storms rising from the sea make it clear that they cannot, she fulfills her duty, hoping that one day she will find a better way, a new path forward where there is no separation between the historian and the wajinru. The solution presented at the end of the story is a surprise, and the deep understanding the others develop for the pain of history—and the importance of holding onto it for themselves—allows Yetu and the wajinru together to reinvent themselves.

While Yetu and the others have no forgiveness for the two-legged villains who threw their original mothers into the sea, or who threaten their world with climate change and an unquenchable thirst for oil, Yetu realizes that there are individuals who are worth learning about and understanding, whether wajinru or two-legged. And it’s her growth and connection to others that maker her so easy to empathize with, and so easy to follow into the bright surface or the depths of the ocean.

Actual Rating: 3.5 stars

The Deep is a novella based on the idea that the babies of African slave women drowned on the ocean crossing, developed the ability to live underwater and formed their own community. There was a lot that I loved about this story and I do think it is worth picking up, even if all of the elements didn't quite come together as cohesively as I would have liked. A friend of mine said that this either should have been shorter or longer, and I tend to agree. That said, much of it is compelling and beautiful, with exploration of themes like collective memory and pain, gender and sexuality, and the complications of parent-child relationships.

Yetu is the Historian for her people, holding their painful memories within her body and only sharing them once a year. But the Remembrances are slowly killing her and one year, she decides to run away after releasing the memories to her people. The novella follows her story and what happens, including a variety of flashbacks to different times. I felt deeply for Yetu and loved the slow-burn romance she ends up developing. The world is inventive and visceral, based on a powerful reframing of horrific acts of violence.

This is also a solidly queer book offering a beautiful approach to conceptualizing gender and sexuality. Rivers Solomon is gender non-binary and they weave that identity into the story. Yetu's people have developed so that gender identification is a choice and everyone has both "male" and "female" genitals. It's an interesting point of discussion in the text, questions of evolutionary realism aside, and offers a different vision of how this could be approached.

There was a lot of this that I loved, but the different flashbacks did not always come together with the rest of the plot and there were points in the story that dragged, despite its brevity. I think this could have been stronger if it was either shortened to only include Yetu's perspective, or lengthened to allow for better integration of other perspectives and timelines. Either way, I'm glad I read it. I received an advance copy of this book for review via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

A stirring and beautiful novel with so many levels. First, just lyrical and beautiful as a story. Second, deeply profound. What if a utopian world where the we is all important began due to a truly appalling event? Pregnant women tossed overboard from slave ships by the thousands whose babies were born and survived in the sea. Third, is our history what saves us or binds us as we entry yo find who we truly are. Pick up this book and be prepared to be forced to think and be moved. And in case you don't usually, read the afterword this time and then find and listen to the sing which came before the novel

I didn't know what to expect when I downloaded this title. What does it mean to write about black mermaids, and to engage with the history of slavery, and of people who were transported from their homes, and lost their original histories? I hadn't heard the eponymous song by Clipping and Daveed Diggs, so I went into Solomon's book only knowing the historical side of the concept, not the song. I wondered whether I would "get" the book without knowing the song.

I needn't have worried. Though I know the song now (and it's fab), Solomon's take on the concept of black mermaids stands on its own easily. Solomon takes the brutal murders of African women as the jumping point for a story that explores people's relationship with their history. How does our history shape who we are -- whether for good, or for bad? How does the burden of history shape us, as opposed to the lack of history? In The Deep, we meet two primary characters whose relationship to their people's history is sharply contrasting -- and they wrestle to understand: is there a right way to be connected to your history? is there a wrong way? Is history ever possible to escape? If these sound like very solemn questions that are more suited to a course on history and critical theory than a novel, then you might worry about whether you'll appreciate this book. But you shouldn't be, because Solomon is incredibly adept at engaging with these questions through the characters of Yetu and Oori, and through the fantasy tropes associated with mermaids. Don't hesitate -- just dive in.

This book seeped into my soul and took hold
Unsurprisingly, as the song did the same the first time I heard it.
This book is small, dense, and so so beautiful.

When I saw Daveed Diggs mentioned as one of the authors, I knew I had to read The Deep. The author takes a tragic story and a phenomenal song into the world of Yetu and her people. Daveed’s group, clipping., created the song of the same name on which this book’s premise is based.

The premise takes place during the time of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and focuses on the cruel treatment of pregnant African women who were thrown overboard at sea. Rivers Solomon took that terrible truth from history, mixed in the premise of a new race from the lyrics of clipping’s song, and wrote a story of hope and love with Yetu and the other wajinru as the featured characters. There is so much to love about this book, even without going into more details.

The Deep, the new novella by Campbell Award-nominated author Rivers Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts), is actually the third iteration of artistic works based on a singularly provocative premise: what if the children of pregnant African women thrown overboard to drown during the slave trade transformed into water-breathers, and build a whole society in the deep ocean?

The band clipping. (made up of Hamilton’s Tony-winning Thomas Jefferson Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes) saw tantalizing glimpses of this world in the largely instrumental music of a Detroit techno duo called Drexciya. So taken with the idea of a utopian underwater civilization populated by the descendants of enslaved Africans, they produced the Hugo-nominated song also titled “The Deep,” a six-minute, textually complex aural epic that tells the story of the Deep’s rising after their kingdom is bombed due to oil prospecting by the surface dwellers. The song was featured in an episode of the radio program This American Life and later attracted the attention of Navah Wolfe, formerly an editor with the science fiction publisher Saga Press, who worked with the band and Rivers Solomon to reimagined the song as a novel. Like the song, Solomon packs a lot into a slender package, giving new voice to the story of people borne out of the horrors of the Middle Passage.

Yetu is a historian of the water-dwelling wajinru. Historians like her have been collecting memories since the time the first mothers—the two-legs who died as their children were born into the deep. This is an act performed by a sort of touch-transfer by those electro-sensitive enough to hold the memories and share them. The existence of a historian like Yetu allows the wajinru to live without the burden of memory; it is also killing her. As the book opens, Yetu is drifting in dangerous waters, lost in remembering. Her mother, Amaba, rescues her, chiding her for her thoughtlessness. But Yetu isn’t thoughtless; she is so full of thought she feels like she’s been emptied of herself. When she tries to explain, telling stories of their people’s past, her mother finds her incomprehensible: her mother cannot understand because she, herself, has no memory.

The role of the historian didn’t sit so heavily on Yetu’s predecessors, but the way her electro-sensitivity is described makes me think she’s neurodiverse from many of her people. She is hurting, in part, because of the way things are done, ways that don’t necessarily account for the divergent. Holding the memories of her entire people is overwhelming. At an annual ritual where Yetu shares her memories in a kind of communion, letting the wajinru live and feel their history for the length of the ceremony, she runs away before taking the memories back. The wajinru are left circling inside a protective structure known as the Womb, lost in the very memories that so overburdened their historian.

The image of the womb is fitting. The very first wajinru were born into the primordial ocean—born breathing water just as they did in the womb. When Yetu leaves her people, they are gestating in another way: lost in reverie while their historian breaches the surface the water, her leave taking invoking a kind of deliverance. As the holder of the wajinru’s memory, Yetu’s search for herself in the wider ocean and on the edges of the land is a search for the wajinru themselves. Yetu’s experiences after leaving her people are intercut with stories of the wajinru—both their bleak origins, which left motherless children alone in the fathomless deep, and the story of how they came together to build a new kind of existence. Their history may begin in horror, but their stories encompass love and power too. The parallel with the real world history of the descendants of enslaved Africans is unmistakeable, and will be as resonant to some readers as it is discomfiting to others.

After excising the paradoxical emptiness of remembering everything, Yetu slowly, carefully begins to heal in mind and spirit. She washes up in a tidal pool and makes tenuous acquaintance with several two-legs. Her most vital relationship is with Oori, a taciturn old salt who is, in similarly heartbreaking ways, also the keeper of her people’s memory. When the time comes to leave the tide pool, it is another kind of birth. Their last interaction in the story brought tears to my eyes, and not of sadness. Solomon has a knack for creating tremulous moments of connection that are searing in their fragility; the ending of their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, is similarly emotional.

The Deep is about the impossible weight of memory, a burden that must be shared to be borne. It is beautiful and terrible and vital, a story that comes from the very depths of of our rough history, transforming as it surfaces and then returns. What was thrown down can rise up.

The premise of fantasy novella The Deep by Rivers Solomon is so intriguing that I was sold on it immediately. The descendants of pregnant African women that were thrown overboard by slavers during the Middle Passage became mermaids and established an undersea society. I requested it from Net Galley and was thrilled when I was approved just before the release of this publication. I couldn't wait to read it. I prioritized it as my first read of November and this is my honest review.

I discovered that the premise of The Deep wasn't the original creation of Rivers Solomon. The men's names listed on the cover are the members of Clipping who wrote a song inspired by the work of Drexciya , and developed it into an Afro-Futurist story line that goes well beyond Solomon's novella. I'd love to see Clipping's entire plot played out in a full length novel. If you want to know more about Clipping's song "The Deep" go to the web page that I've hyperlinked.

Readers will also need to know that they will not be seeing the first hand accounts of kidnapped African women who experienced the horrors of the Middle Passage in Solomon's version.

The protagonist of this novella is Yetu who is the historian of this underwater culture. This doesn't mean that she's written books about their history. She carries their entire history within her mind. Yetu tells us repeatedly about the pain of these memories. I can imagine that they would be painful, but it's difficult for me to fully identify with Yetu if we aren't allowed to experience any of these historical memories in the course of the narrative. We are told about them in some sort of chaotic montage. Since Yetu's difficulty with enduring her people's history is supposed to be the central conflict of Solomon's The Deep, I think it's really crucial that we feel some part of it with her.

I don't claim that this novella is a complete failure. We are shown part of Yetu's life before she became a historian and what happened to her later in the narrative. I felt that these aspects of the novella were stronger and more emotionally resonant. Some might argue that these do represent the heart of the novella. It's been called a re-telling of Hans Christian Anderson's tale, "The Little Mermaid". I do see that a radically revisionist retelling is part of what Solomon is trying to accomplish here, but I don't perceive it as central.

I think Solomon was attempting to write about history, its transmission and its importance to society as a whole. These weighty themes somehow got lost in the telling. The message got submerged in the ocean's depths. From an intellectual standpoint, I can see that Solomon intended to include these ideas. Yet she didn't do any more than touch on them before they sank, and disappeared from view. This reviewer is not a deep sea diver. So I cannot retrieve them. I can only tell you that it seems to me that the heart of Rivers Solomon's The Deep is missing.

I loved the development of the rich and original concept of a society of aquatic fishy-hominids (the wajinru) living in the ocean, the descendants of pregnant women murdered at sea by slavers. The main character, Yetu, lives in this world, and holds all the memories of all of her wajinru kin so that they can be free of the horrific memories and live a joyful, simple life in the present. Holding all of these memories is torturous for Yetu, and she decides to find another way for them to live.

(It is very similar to the plot of <i>The Giver</i> by Lois Lowry, my favorite childhood book. On one hand it was familiar and pleasant, on the other hand I couldn't shake the feeling that I had been on this ride once before.)

In general, I'm glad I read it, and it's the kind of book you want someone else to read so you can discuss it with them.

I first heard about THE DEEP from a podcast review only recently; others will have had a much longer story with this series of tellings than I, and what I love about Solomon's book, and clipping.'s song before it, and Drexciya's music before that, is that they all exist in conversation with each other, endlessly recursive, endlessly sorrowful and full of unearned gifts of knowledge and wisdom and kindness, and all of them valid entry points into the larger mass of story that is THE DEEP.

On the surface, THE DEEP is a weird novella that takes place in either a parallel history or an alternate history or a future history rooted in one of the ultimate crimes ever committed by one person against another: the slave trade, in particular the superfluously callous disposal of pregnant women overboard during ocean crossings. People will be tempted to call it Afrofuturism for obvious reasons, as former Saga Press Senior Editor Navah Wolfe* does in her introductory note to the advance reader copy I was so damn lucky to be gifted (many thanks to Saga and BookishFirst for that). Time is wobbly in this novella, and I wouldn't have it any other way, but it certainly does make tense and labeling a problematic exercise.

But THE DEEP is many-layered, as one might expect both from a book inspired by a song inspired by another body of work, and also as one might expect from an author such as Rivers Solomon. There are many stories to be told about the events it employs as inspiration, but it is a credit to all of the creators (singers, songwriters, performers, author, and editor) involved that this is a story about both the restorative and the continually injurious functions of memory and grief, their inextricability, and the beauty of building relationships with those who carry the burden of memory (and loss) alongside us. The idea is an especially potent one to me, the failed writer who cannot even revisit my graduate thesis on three family forgettings without reliving memories my body isn't ready to handle. Speaking from personal experience, the twin physical and psychological tolls of remembering critical memories as described in THE DEEP are very, very real. Like, I'm-currently-on-medication-and-seeking-intensive-therapy-for-that-kind-of-remembering real. This book speaks to that reality in a way that is sensitive and accurate.

Stylistically, this book was not quite even. Those who loved the style and language of AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS will find nothing to dislike here, but I do occasionally find Solomon's voice dry and distant, or perhaps more accurate a touch more disjointed than I personally enjoy. There is some skipping around with the point of view that makes sense on a story mechanics level but kicked me out of my immersion, and that might play a role. But while I note those elements which detracted a bit from my personal experience, I cannot stress how important and valuable I think this novella to be. It's a compelling thought experiment layered with additional compelling thought experiments, and the more I delve into the backstory of THE DEEP (and clipping.'s process and inspiration as well), the more I fall in love with this weird little game of telephone among all these amazing, excellent storytellers. Many thanks to Rivers Solomon for such powerful words; many thanks to Navah Wolfe for asking for them; many thanks to the band clipping. for the song that inspired Wolfe's request; many thanks to the folks behind This American Life who commissioned the song; many thanks to Drexciya for the mythology; and many, many thanks to those who have dedicated their lives to remembering what so many of us find convenient, or necessary, to forget ... even in part.

* Wolfe may no longer be with Saga because of restructuring, but as is evidenced by THE DEEP (brought into book form in large part by her efforts although released after her departure) her work will continue to bring much credit to the imprint ... and all future imprints, authors, and entities associated with her name.

This was an intriguing read! It was dark and intense! A page turner that kept me on the edge of my seat!

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own

The Deep by Rivers Solomon; Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes was such an amazing novel! I loved everything about it