I honestly found this book difficult to read, and I'm going to need to try it again, given all of the rave reviews of it. My initial attempt to read it left me wanting (I think it was due to unfair expectations of what the story was actually about), and I ended up putting it down due to the slow pacing.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon Daveed Diggs, &William Hutson Jonathan Snipes is my most highly anticipated Fantasy of 2019 and let me tell you it was worth every moment waiting for this. This book was so beautifully written, descents of pregnant African slave women who were thrown overboard by slave owners, this book blew me away. I have NEVER ready anything like this.

I have never heard of the song The Deep or the group Clipping, so I googled it then went back and reread the book and OMG! Talk about chills. Look this book is an absolute must read. Thank you, Thank you, Net Galley & Gallery / Saga Press for gifting me this copy. This was an easy 5/5 star read for me.

Poetic and stunning story telling that is powerful and thought provoking! I read it all in one sitting, and was captivated from start to finish. I highly recommend this read, as it took me out of my own cultural perspective and touches on an innate desire for a connection to our ancestors, along with a need to find our individual selves within the whole of our communities.

Thank you to Saga Press and NetGalley for the e-ARC to read and review.

"The Deep" is a thought-provoking work that embraces the history of pregnant African slave women being thrown overboard slave ships, along with their histories, memories and identities.

Yetu is a powerful but frail character. She serves as the medium, the Historian, to her people who carries the memories of their descendants. This way her people (the wajinru) can live without the pain of their descendants terrible past. After two decades, Yetu is near death by her position that she sees as an unfair burden while others see it as an honor. So she seeks to claim a better life for herself that so few during that time can claim to have achieved.

In her moments of tumultuous pain and grief, it's impossible not to acknowledge how far we are removed from that particular history that we sometimes cannot fathom the trauma of it all. Yetu, therefore, must carry that history for all wajinru and the reader.

The story is tragically beautiful. No matter the depths within which the wajinru live in order to escape the pain of the past, it still haunts them, finds them in the darkest depths.

At times I found it hard to believe that Yetu's people couldn't even muster up an ounce of sympathy for what Yetu goes through in some phantom feeling. I know they have no memory of the past and therefore whatever Yetu says comes across as fantasy and imaginings, but periodically there is a gap in their being that needs to be filled briefly with those memories in order to survive. After the Remembrance, they happily move on with their lives - unlike Yetu.

I love the themes of identity and culture that courses throughout the story. It's lessons beg to be heard: that history no matter how painful is not something to forget but to embrace and learn from.

After reading this book I am left impassive but moved, sad yet embolden. I ache but wish the story would continue. I am lost in thought. Great story!

This book has an interesting backstory: inspired by a song written for the podcast This American Life by the rap group Clipping. It is a world where the children of pregnant women thrown overboard during slave trade survived their mother’s murders and become the wajinru - a ocean dwelling people.

Solomon builds off this premise and creates a main character who seeks to find herself apart from her job of remembering all of the wajinru’s past. I enjoyed reading this book and immersing myself in this world. I will be recommending this book to library patrons interested in fantasy and well written prose.

Thanks to netgalley for the chance to read this great book.

A really powerful book, it felt like being underwater. I really had to concentrate, it was very outside of my usual white experience and I loved it. I want to be stretched in my reading and see from other people's point of view. I want more books like this!

I don't think I've ever read something quite like this novella. It's completely unique in the best, most fascinating way. The fantastical worldbuilding is enthralling and the story is so powerful, both in a raw, painful way and a wondrous, beautiful way. Yetu themself, along with the other historians, show a huge variety in how they lead and see their people. (Sidenote: I really loved the use of plural pronouns and the reasoning behind it. The whole author's note will be very interesting to any fantasy writer.)

It's a really emotional story, one that seeps into you and weighs heavy, but it should. The past that made this story is a thousand times more than anything I've experienced in my life. I feel as though I've glimpsed something, much like how the wajinru experience their Remembrance, that'll stay with me for a long time. Beautifully done.

Note: I received a free Kindle edition of this book via NetGalley in exchange for the honest review above. I would like to thank NetGalley, the publisher Saga Press, and the author Rivers Solomon for the opportunity to do so.

Can I give this 10 stars? Because I really want to give it 10 stars.

There is so much to unpack in this novel(la?) that I honestly don't really know where to start. There is an afterword explaining where the idea came from and how it was transformed, and I had read in a few reviews about the song by clipping., The Deep, that inspired the book. I went and listened to the song and really absorbed the lyrics.

The afterword explained how the gender and first-person narratives were stripped away in the song and "y'all" was used instead. In the book, many characters have a distinctly male or female gender, but several are referred to as "they." The characters we see in flashbacks, Zoti and Basha, are both non-gendered as "we." And Yetu explains to Oori at one point that the wajinru (the mer-folk) aren't truly gendered, as they can mate as male or female with anyone, and anyone can carry a child. I thought this was an interesting way to present the information, because we aren't focused on whether we're reading about a male or female mermaid, but rather that they are something different. These creatures were born of violence and necessity, and a little magic. What does gender matter?

The question of identity outside of the self is explored quite well. The wajinru give up most of their memories to the Historian, who carries the memory of all wajinru since the beginning. They are then left as empty shells, who don't form meaningful memories, and don't carry their history with them. Then Yetu meets and becomes close to a "two-legs," Oori, whose sense of self is destroyed because she doesn't have a home anymore, she's the last of her people. Yetu can't understand how that kills a person, because she sees it every day with her people. The two come to an understanding after a lot of struggle and discussion.

Yetu's adventure away from the wajinru gives her the inspiration and strength she needs to be part of her people and yet still maintain her sense of self. I loved how at the end she learns to harness her own power and use it to make an entirely new creature, and it's left a bit open for anything that may evolve from these artists in the future.

Seriously meaningful stuff, and I'm not even scratching the surface here. I am not a POC, and I don't carry their history inside me, so I don't want to impose my own meaning on something that may mean something entirely different. But I did appreciate and connect with the material and even if you're looking at it as pure fantasy, it is a spectacular read.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review.

This book was phenomenal. So many layers. It constantly made me aware of the weight and importance of cultural memory, as both a Black person and a queer person. I hope this book finds a wide audience.

I got an ARC of this book.

Every time I went to the beach as a kid I had a strange sensation that would distract me for hours afterwards. I would be sitting perfectly still, but I would still feel the waves hitting my body. I have no idea if I was the only one who ever felt that sensation, since no one else ever mentioned feeling the water so long after we left it. This book gave me that sensation. It made the ocean feel like home. It was able to make the loneliness and the pain feel so intensely real. More real than the waves ever were. 

I had gotten the book, because of the cover. I saw a mermaid. That was all I really cared about. I had half read the description. Even fully reading the description after I have read the book doesn't even come close to what this book provides. There is just so many feelings and so much pain. There is more pain than I ever expected seeing a mermaid on a cover of a book. The thing is, that is not a mermaid. 

There is this really intense and slight romance or at the very least a friendship based on a weird compromise and understanding. It was something that I lived for. I couldn't imagine life continuing after or without that connection. This book swallowed me whole. It made me feel every emotion and there was no respite. I felt as if I was the historian or going through the remembering. I knew nothing, but I also knew there was more and ached for more. Solomon is an amazing author. I just can't explain in anything that resembles even a semblance of what I feel about this book and what it did to me. READ IT. 

Listening to the song after reading the book, just is magical in a way that I have not experienced before. Yes, it is on Spotify and I may be listening to it on repeat while writing this. All of the feelings just won't stop. I am destroyed. 

This might just be the best book I have read this year or potentially ever. I just. So many feelings. I still feel them so intensely, its like I am still reading the book. I hope, like the waves, they subside after time. I feel so lost. I can't imagine moving on from this story. It feels so real.

Inspired by the song "The Deep" this story is about the pregnant slave women who were thrown overboard. Their babies already suspended in water in the womb, took to ocean life and a new race was created. This race now depends on one of there kind to hold all of the memories of their existence. She who hold the memories is in pain due to the traumatic events in their life. The other are like empty shells devoid of memories or thoughts.
The memory holder rebels and decides not to hold the memories alone, but shares with each of her kind.
Descriptive, flowing, beautiful prose make up this novella. Brilliant.

Deep in the Atlantic Ocean live mermaids descended from pregnant Africans thrown overboard slave ships. Yetu is one of these creatures chosen as a historian, tasked with remembering the traumatic history that led to their own survival. But is the burden of remembering too much for Yetu to bear?

Based on a song by clipping., this is an imaginative, nuanced, and dynamic mythos that imagines a more empowered ending for those captured as slaves. Rivers Solomon has a great gift for layered storytelling, and their writing added such beautiful detail to the concept introduced by clipping. I got chills reading this novella. It's atmospheric, dark, and painful, but also hopeful. The Deep is a stunning story that won't soon be forgotten.

Everything Solomon writes is pure gold. I was absolutely stunned and in love with An Unkindness of Ghosts and it's no different with The Deep. Introspective and emotional, The Deep asks questions about memory, the community versus the individual, and more. The Deep encompasses my deep love for the work of Rivers Solomon plus my fascination of mermaids. I can't think of a better combination. From the summary alone I fell in love - the concept of a people forgetting their history, except for one person. There's something inexplicably moving. To be without our past, but one person burdened with the memories. Yetu is the Historian and is forced to relive her pain for their memories that they cannot hold.

It's the responsibility of carrying your people's past. Reliving those moments of trauma, sadness, guilt, and pain under your skin. Roaring in your mind and threatening to take over at a moments notice. When we forget our past, their struggles, and their scars. The Deep examines Yetu's personal journey as she seeks to escape the burden of the collective past which she shoulders alone. Interspersed with memories, The Deep is an experience that makes it feel like we are living these moments ourselves as they are brought to life.

The Deep is a compelling novella focused on the importance of history as a part of cultural identity, specifically within the black community. This short tale is focused, coherent, and was written to convey its message clearly and concisely: even if the past is painful and full of trauma, it is key to understanding our modern identity both as individuals and as a larger cultural group. Our past leaves an indelible imprint on our present.

The premise of the book is rooted in the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade, viewed through a surprisingly optimistic lens. Where the slave trade caused irreparable harm, new opportunities for community and identity have been born. The wajinru, a mermaid-like race living in the sea, are the sea-born offspring of pregnant black slaves who have been tossed over the side of slave ships to die. The wajinru live with the opportunity to live a life grounded not in their past, but rather in the present: each of the wajinru is possessed of a memory that blanks out the pain of the past. Yetu, however, is the exception to this. She is the wajinru’s Historian, who holds all the generational memories that are too painful for her culture as a whole to hold. They overwhelm her, subsume her, until she simply can’t take it any longer. The past begins to blur with the present, and the imbalance between the two is too much for anyone to handle.

However, the wajinru who don’t have Yetu’s connection to the History still need a taste of it to ground them to who they are. Every year, they come together for a telling of the History across three days. It is experienced with all the senses, it is lived. The Historian passes the History out away from herself, such that she might finally have a moment of peace while the rest of her people experience the memories she held in trust. This is both the best part of Yetu’s life and the hardest: it gives her a chance to breathe without the weight of her ancestors, yet the energy needed to guide the other wajinru through the remembering is immense.

‘Yetu knew what they would do. First, seize her. Next, gut her mind. Last, fill her empty shell with ancestors and pretend they hadn’t just murdered Yetu by forcing her to endure these memories endlessly for another year. The thought of it made her shake. This time, she wouldn’t emerge from it. There would be no Yetu left for the next Remembrance. She’d be dead. Yetu wouldn’t let them do it.’

When Yetu refuses to take the memories back from her people during the remembering, she undertakes a journey to find out who she is on her own. She meets the humans who are her ancestors, finds both kindness and heartbreak. Without the memories, she initially believes herself to finally be whole once more. There is space for her, without thousands of voices clamoring to be heard inside of her.

‘“I know who I am now. All I knew before was who they were, who they wanted me to be,” said Yetu. “And it was killing me. It did kill me. I wasn’t Yetu. I was just a shell for their whims.”

Oori shook her head and stood up from the water. “But your whole history. Your ancestry. That’s who you are.”

“No. I am who I am now. Before, I was no one.”’

As she does this, the wajinru she’s left behind create their own storm. In facing the rememberings without guidance, they find that they are not prepared to understand their origins on their own. Their anger at the way they have been treated comes to the forefront, and the ocean responds to their fear and hatred. Yetu is faced with a choice: she must leave the wajinru to sink the world and retain her own personhood, or she must take on the Histories once more to prevent the collapse of the world as she knows it.

Although I loved the themes and premise of this book, the one thing that didn’t work well for me was the prose. It was often too distant for me to truly connect to either the atmosphere or to the characters themselves. I appreciate novellas for their ability to convey big concepts in small spaces, but this seemed like a book that suffered for the length; these characters and ideas could have been teased out into a much stronger novel-length book with greater focus on imagery, description, and characters. As it was, it was simply too laser-focused on the narrative and ideas for me to be completely drawn in the way I prefer. The characters didn’t have a chance to grow and acquire quite as much nuance as I had hoped.

Nevertheless, this is an incredibly culturally significant novella. Too often, these are actual voices and actual histories which are glossed over and erased. Fantasy is a powerful genre to bring these back to the forefront, and I love seeing this done effectively – especially in formats such as novellas which are typically more challenging to break into. Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes have all come together to raise their voices in this short yet poignant work.

The Deep is a beautiful work of art! The language has a rhythm to it that takes a little getting used to, but once you fall into it, it is soothing like hearing waves against the shore.

If you are looking at the cover and hoping for a Disney-like mermaid story, don't get your hopes up any farther. This isn't a typical mermaid fairy tale, so anyone expecting songs and singing crabs is going to be very disappointed. There's a darkness to this story, a sadness wrapped around every turn of the page. It's built so well into the story that the reader can feel its weight but still crave it, like a fish craves the pressure of water against it's fins.

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

The worldbuilding and overarching concepts in this book are very interesting. We are introduced to an underwater society (basically mermaids though that word is never used) descended from enslaved African women who were tossed overboard during the middle passage. As long as you are willing to suspend disbelief and accept that quite a few things about them can best be explained as “because magic,” it’s a pretty cool concept.

The authors explore themes related to painful history and identity. Our protagonist is the society’s “historian”: a role that seems to be ripped straight out of Lois Gowry’s The Giver (though repurposed a bit). Most of the book focuses on her trauma from having to bear the painful memories of all her ancestors while the rest of her society live essentially without memory.

How the “historian’s” trauma was handled is where the book lost me a bit. Apparently the authors felt that the best way to convey the depth of this trauma is to have her go over and over and over it in almost the exact same words for pages on end, circling back to it repeatedly while giving short shrift to actually describing the memories. Repetitive morbid introspection is a pet peeve of mine, and this book has it in spades. Add to this a completely tangential semi-detailed discussion of “mermaid” sexuality that seems designed purely to check off the “look how woke we are” box, and I feel like the book’s pace was completely off. Overall, interesting story, but it would have been much better as a short story rather than a novella.

(Also, this book developed out of a rap song by Clipping which is definitely worth looking up on youtube)

When pregnant African slaves were thrown overboard, they helped create a species of mer-people that live in the deep of the ocean. Yeta is the only person in their species that carries they memories of their frightening history because they are too hard for the others to bare. But once a year they gather together so Yeta can share the knowledge of the past. Afterwards the others are soon released of their grief and Yeta is forced to endure it all alone again and it’s killing her. Determined to leave the past behind for a better future she flees her people. Along the way she must make tough choices and discovers much about herself and her people along the way. I am amazed that such a short novel could pack so much meaning behind a fantasy story!

*Thanks to NetGalley and Saga Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review*

I knew this was going to be intense, and I suspected it was going to be beautiful, but it still hit me hard. I cried a lot. It’ll be drowning my brain for a few days while I recover. In the meantime, I’ll say what I can about it that isn’t too spoilery.

Rivers Solomon is a master at exploring trauma through narrative, and in “The Deep,” it’s both intergenerational trauma and the burden of collective memory carried by one, unwilling, person. The wajinru are undersea people descended from the pregnant women thrown out of slave ships, and just as they evolved gills and fins to adapt to their new home, they also developed a way to manage the memory of their brutal past: transfer those memories and their histories to one individual so the other 6,000 wajinru can live without its painfulness.

This solution seems unsustainable, and Yetu—the current historian chosen to carry the past—agrees. Previous historians didn’t feel as tortured by the memories as Yetu does, and the painfulness of the memories (as well as other sensory input) stem from a hypersensitivity reminiscent of Lauren Olamina’s in Octavia Butler’s “Earthseed” series. Unlike Olamina’s hyperempathy, Yetu’s pain is the price of peace for the rest of the wajinru, who don’t believe it’s as bad as she tells them it is, and continue to choose their oblivion over her health. It’s an undersea Omelas.

What makes it most difficult for Yetu is the tug of war between her individual sense of self and the importance of being part of the community. The community’s memories physically hurt her, but she still feels a duty to carry them, to the point of suicidal ideation, and then on top of all that, still feels guilty about not being able to fulfill this duty without dreaming of ending it. She feels like she has no personhood, and it’s literally killing her. Yetu’s in a bad place and nobody else can help her.

While I felt most interested in this push-and-pull of individual vs collective, there’s so much more going on, I’m sure scholars and people smarter than I are going to write lots of papers about it all. The role of white supremacist violence in intergenerational trauma and adaptation to that violent memory (and continued violence, both evolved and not); Clipping’s approach of “emphasizing collaborative authorship” and how that’s mirrored in the story; the evolution of the story in terms of each collaborator’s background; gender identities in two-legs vs wajinru; and dozens of other paths to understanding the story that I can recognize the outlines of, but don’t quite have the brain capacity right now to translate them to words.

This is going to be an important book for a lot of reasons. It’s already an important book for a lot of reasons. Read it. Listen to the song. Follow up with any other materials any of the collaborators recommend.

Rating: five stars.

"Remember," she said.
This was their story. This was where they began. Drowning.
"Submit," Yetu whispered, talking to herself as much as to them.

The Deep is a story borne out of the legacy of slavery, of the horrifying reality of slavers crossing the Atlantic Ocean and dumping the bodies of pregnant women over board. It is a story borne out of wondering about what life might grow out of that death. The Deep is a story of origins and new beginnings, of the horror of institutional memory and what it costs the individual.

Rivers Solomon takes the song "The Deep" from Clipping and gives it further live and character, gives it a different perspective and richness that the song hinted at but that Solomon had the room to explore across 176 pages that wasn't possible in the same way Clipping could do in five and a half minutes. Clipping's song "The Deep" was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form in 2018.

"We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking, who am I? Where do I come from? What does this all mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities."

As the sole historian for the wajinru, it is Yetu's role and responsibility to remember the history of their race. Except for the historian, the wajinru functonally do not have long term memory or a sense of identity. With that lack of memory for the individual, the annual Remembrance gives live to the group because without it they would continue to forget who they are and where they came from. That sounds superficial, but Rivers Solomon and Clipping are not concerned with the surface. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the novella's title (and the song's) is more than just the depth where the wajinru exist.

The wajinru's gradual forgetting of their cultural past causes great pain and desperation and it's tied to a loss of individual identity as well. It is the "endless longing" quoted above. It's more than symbolic. Born from the bodies of the pregnant women thrown into the ocean by slavers, the wajinru are something new and the creation of the wajinru is so awful, so painful, that over the course of generations they adapt so that only one must bear the weight of history. The rest are blessed and cursed to forget. Both are with heavy cost.

I have never read anything like The Deep.

Solomon's writing is incredible. With only a few sentences I felt the water, the pressure of the deep, the movement of current and body. The water almost became a character and, not to mix metaphors too much, grounded the story into a particular location that the reader can sense.

The Deep is a novella filled with pain and despair and rage and a glimmer of hope. It is built off of real history and pulled in unimaginable directions, except that it was imagined and we're all better off because Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes, and Rivers Solomon saw the possibilities of building something beautiful out of raw horror.

"What is belonging?" we ask
She says," Where loneliness ends"

The Deep is is a must read novella in a year stuffed full of must read books. This is essential reading.

I received a galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

The very concept of this novella is incredible: that the babies of pregnant African women, fallen/dropped/thrown from slave ships during the Atlantic slave trade became children of the ocean--merfolk. It was originally a song performed by the Clipping, a group that includes the original Thomas Jefferson from the musical Hamilton, Daveed Diggs. The musical group collaborated with Rivers Solomon to create a full, intricate story.

The result is a beautifully-written work, and a fast read at that. Yetu is the historian of her kind, and her task is onerous: she's supposed to continue living as herself, even as she channels the vivid, often horrific memories of those who came before her. She knows the full truth of why her kind exist. Yetu is especially sensitive to these memories and has barely lived as herself. Once a year, though, she channels these memories to all of her kin--and this time, during the ceremony, she makes a dire choice.

I found Yetu's story to be strong and she is easy to relate to. I didn't want to stop reading once I started. I ended up blazing through in a day! I was a bit lost at a few points, though, and at one point DNA is referenced, which seemed like a weird anachronism to slip through. The ending is a bit predictable, but thoroughly satisfying.

I enjoyed another work that Rivers Solomon collaborated in, the Serial Box novel called The Vella. They are definitely an author to watch.