I enjoyed reading several aspects of this book! The pacing was wonderful, characters were well drawn, and the reading experience on the whole was delightful.

A Song Below Water lifts the veil into another Porland, where the myths and magic come alive. Gargoyles guard Black girls. Children turn to stone. Black girls voices ring with beauty and demand justice. The Supernatural resides at the local high school, in the hall ways and at the pool, at the Ren Faire and the Park.

Effie and Tavia are sisters of the heart. They are always there for each other. Each deals with a new moment in their life. A new call for justice and murder of Black people takes over the city. Sirens become a heated subject, as fingers are pointed at them.

In Morrow’s world, Sirens are dangerous. For many Sirens, it means keeping their identities secret and their voices hidden. As fingers are pointed at sirens, many come out fighting for Black justice and for Siren’s rights. Morrow beautifully tells us the intersectionality of Black girls, the marginal spaces between being Women and Black.

Things I’ve been obsessing over:

- Gargoyles
- Black girls looking like princesses= a plus
- Latino love interest
- Black sisterhood
- Ren Faires
- Natural Hair Feminism
- Black Girl Magic

It’s also very apparent that other reviewers had a hard time distinguishing Effie’s voice from Tavia’s and I agree on that. I had to check back to who was talking because sometime’s I forgot which chapter it belonged to. As people, they have different story lines. It’s more about sound of voice. They tend to sound the same, to be perfectly frank here.

This could of been a lot better. It had a purpose and a drive with a lot of interesting supernatural creatures but fell flat in the execution.

This could of been a lot better. It had a purpose and a drive with a lot of interesting supernatural creatures but fell flat in the execution. However, I could for ages about the wonderful descriptions of Black girls hair. I’ve never seen it done quite like this, to the extent of this.

Thank You To Tor Teen for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review

4.5 stars!

The cover is amazing and I would love more covers in this illustrated style.

The setting for this book was amazing and it was definitely a refreshing break from high fantasy books. ASBW is extremely relevant to current events and I enjoyed reading about characters from a very different background than me. The female friendship was so wholesome and is something that's needed more in ya books today.

One critique I would have of the book is that it's a little slow-paced, especially because of the abundance of internal monologue.

Thank you to TOR for a an ARC of this book, all opinions are my own. A Song Below Water spins a fantastical world where some magic is real--mischevious sprites, sirens, and Gargoyles, but not all of it, and where black women & girls are made more "dangerous" than black men because of the hidden presence of sirens, who can command with their voices. Come for the #blackgirlmagic, stay for the sisterhood bond of understanding between Tavia and Effie. Although the world-building may lack in certain areas, the character evolution of these two is outstanding. Bonus points for their very timely side-eye at performative wokeness from allies who just discovered causes that had been there all along.

A SONG BELOW WATER by Bethany C. Morrow is an interesting sci-fi, fantasy read. It has received some great reviews - Jason Reynolds calls it "beautiful" and "brilliant" and includes it in his list of suggestions for summer reads (see video link below). Yet, I found the beginning to be slow and confusing and did not understand who these girls, friends Tavia and Effie, were supposed to be - in part because I had difficulty picturing them. Both are Black and it seems like they are also some kind of mer-people; plenty of comments about swimming and scaly skin for Effie and about Tavia's ability to use a siren call to influence others' actions. However, they try to hide their powers and often act rather sad and afraid. Like other young people, they struggle with restrictions and expectations imposed by the adults in their lives. Morrow does explore themes of marginalization, trauma, and prejudice and the fantasy aspect is reinforced with a guardian gargoyle, mischievous sprites, and privileged eloko characters. Readers who like fantasy may be more engaged than I was. The cover is indeed beautiful and A SONG BELOW WATER received a starred review from Booklist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNPmGPgBri4

A glorious and touching coming of age. I'm seriously going to give this to every teenage girl I know. The dual perspectives serve to build a compelling dialogue between the two main characters, fleshing out their world and relationship. The story itself resonates so strongly with current times, I had to put it down a few times to gather my thoughts. And then, of course, I picked it back up so quickly because I just had to know what happened. Just wonderful storytelling.

In a world where Sirens must hide who they are, this fantasy looks at the power of one's voice, discovering who you truly are, and the bond of sisterhood. Tavia finds it harder and harder every day to keep her Siren voice under control and from being discovered. She doesn't want to be forced to wear a Siren collar. At the same time her best friend Effie is also dealing with changes. Add in a gargoyle who lives on the roof, mysterious mirages, and the Renaissance Fair, this fantasy will keep you guessing.

Many thanks to JeanBookNerd and Tor Teen for an ARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

I knew as soon as I saw this announced that I had to read this book. I mean, first, there’s two stunning black girls on the cover, and I’ve been wanting to see more of that ever since I was a little black girl who never got to see anyone who looked like her in pretty much anything. But more than that, this book felt important … and it was. For many reasons.

At its core, A Song Below Water, is about finding one’s voice in a world that has systematically enforced silence, in a world that’s repeatedly said, “The voices of people like you are dangerous.” It’s a powerful narrative, spun masterfully in a unique fantasy setting.

I’m going to be upfront and say, right off the bat, that contemporary isn’t really my thing. I’m not a huge fan of the tropes, and it’s usually so slow to me, because I really want action and intrigue. Still, I liked it, despite that, so do with that what you will.

My Thoughts:

- This book reads more like a contemporary with fantasy elements thrown in, so I would definitely recommend it more to those who trend towards reading contemporary. Really, this book reads like a thinly veiled allegory, where obvious parallels are drawn between this fantasy world and real life. While reading it, there are things that alluded to national news events in a rather heavy-handed way, so I doubt someone could miss them. But then there were the subtleties … and oh, how wonderfully they came together. Because microaggressions are a thing, and I don’t think a lot of people realize that. What I loved about this setting is that I think sometimes real-world struggles benefit from being taken out of the real world and transformed into allegory. It eases a person’s knee-jerk, defensive reaction in a way that often lets them actually think about what they’re reading in a more detached way, rather than the immediate, real-life effect on them. It’s actually what I love about fantasy, and it’s what I think worked so well about this book. These are based on real-life occurrences, but it’s so much easier to digest when you’re thinking about bias against sirens than something in real life.

- Speaking of the sirens … the racism/prejudice in this is pretty heavy handed and hard to stomach, so if that’s a trigger, I’m going to warn about it right now. Sirens are dangerous, because of course they are. Their voices are dangerous, and they have to be silenced because of it. Which would make so much sense … if not for the fact that elokos have a similar charming power, and they’re seen as pillars of the community. They just don’t all happen to be black. I thought this distinction was so well done, that creatures with similar powers could be treated so differently by society, simply because of a narrative in history so old that no one really remembers its origin. Make no mistakes, though, some of the things you’ll read in this book should churn your stomach, because they were just … not cool. That’s an understatement for it, but I don’t think there are adequate words to express it. The fact that these things happen to everyday people in real life should add another layer of outrage. As I said in the previous point, though, removing it from the real world makes it much easier to focus on the thing and not the narrative surrounding it.

- Let’s talk about this world for a second, because I absolutely loved it. It’s mythical creatures layered into a real-world setting. It’s basically contemporary plus every mythology that’s ever existed. It’s this interesting cross-section of fantasy and contemporary that just worked. Really well, actually. The fantasy added an element of mystery and intrigue, as new species are revealed and the interactions among them are shown and the way society treats them. It added a really interesting and unique layer to it all that added to some of the mystery. And there’s gargoyles! I can’t remember the last time they popped up in a book, but I happened to love the gargoyle in this.

- Aside from the obvious social commentary, there is some mystery and intrigue, particularly in Effie’s story, as she tries to figure out who she is. Something happened in Effie’s past that made her well-known, but for not-so-great reasons, and she carries the guilt from it with her. Survivor’s guilt, basically. She doesn’t know why or how it happened, and that’s part of the mystery. I was really caught up in Effie’s struggle, and once it really got going, I found it was hard to put down because I just had to know. For me, this was the crux of the story because I do so love a good mystery to solve. Plus, the way the fantasy elements came together with this (and the way it sits in juxtaposition to the prejudice against sirens) really brought the storyline together in a unique way.

- Even though this is a fantasy, what this boils down to is if you want to try to start understanding Black experience in America, this is a good place to start. What I loved about this book is that, while telling a compelling story, it slipped in little things that make up the entirety of the Black experience that I think someone may not understand or might just overlook as insignificant. When added up, though, it is significant.

Sticking Points:

- This book felt so slow until about the middle of it, when Effie’s mystery really amps up. I’m not sure if this was because this is geared towards contemporary readers and I’m a fantasy reader or what, but it didn’t work for me. Tavia’s story of being a siren is really the important one here as far as real-world events, but it was kind of uninteresting to me. Effie’s struggle with finding her own identity was what really pulled me in, and I’m not sure the book could have stood as well without her. Though, at the same time, the fact that there were two differing struggles and storylines also meant that the story ended up being pulled in multiple different paths, and because of that, I’m not sure I got the full effect of either.

- There’s so much happening in this book, that I think it suffers a little from being pulled in so many different directions. Tavia’s storyline is heavily skewed towards racial injustice and fighting for equality, which is a super important message that I in no way want to detract from. But it was also kind of boring. Shoehorned into this, though, was the struggles she has with her identity and her parents (which is never fully resolved and left me feeling a little annoyed) and a failed romance. Her story is very much about finding herself, which I enjoyed, particularly the whole concept of finding her voice, but I’m not the target reader for that kind of book. It just doesn’t hold my attention.

Effie’s storyline, on the other hand, was much more fantasy. There were things that happened in her past that she doesn’t understand, a father she’s never met and knows nothing about, and weird things that start happening to her that she can’t explain. This definitely caught my attention, but again, there was so much more happening that the story felt pulled in a bunch of other directions. What it boils down to, for me, is that the story felt like it was trying to do so many things, each important in their own way, that it lacked focus. I didn’t feel like everything was sufficiently wrapped up for me, and the ending ended up feeling rushed to a conclusion, because there was so much to try to wrap up all at once that things necessarily fell to the wayside.

- I wish the world-building and character development had been a little more sound. Yes, I loved the world, as I said, but at the same time, I was confused by parts of it. For example, elokos. They’re not really described, and I had to Google what they were, but the real-world mythology didn’t seem to match the book mythology, so even now, I don’t have a very clear picture of what they are. More than that, in a world full of potentially dangerous mythical creatures (because who knows how many are really out there, aside from what are mentioned), why are sirens the only one persecuted so? I felt like this is where the allegory broke down, because this background just didn’t seem explained all that well. As far as character development goes, there were a lot of characters, and I kept getting them confused, because they mostly sounded the same. This was especially true for our two point-of-view characters, Effie and Tavia. There were times when I was reading a chapter and I had to go back to the beginning because I thought I’d been reading from one perspective, but then something that was mentioned made me realize I was wrong, so I had to go check the chapter heading again and reorient myself. It felt like both perspectives had basically the same voice, which made it kind of confusing to keep the two girls separate, and they kept blending together in my mind.

This novel is an inspiring novel about the amazing friendship between Tavia and Effie. I am obsessed with mermaids and sirens, so when I saw this cover, I knew I had to read. My favorite part about this novel was the fact that it was a fantasy that dealt with racism, social justice, and current politics. I was in awe while reading the delicious world that Morrow created. As an educator, I cannot wait to include this book in my classroom and curriculum. There are so many places where this book will be able to fit.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Tor Teen for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Holy cow... I know I will never have the words to express how this story completely blew me away. Morrow took on the incredibly challenging task of bringing fantasy into a realistic world as a way to confront racism, misogyny, social justice, police brutality, and the current political climate of the modern United States. Regardless of its YA status, this book takes all of those topics and brings them right to the forefront, shining light onto them until they are hot enough to burn you. She pulls no punches and absolutely knocks it out of the park. It's emotional and raw, but written so beautifully, so poignantly - ugh, I ached with this book. Bethany Morrow went hard in this book and it's exactly what this world needs right now.

Readers also experience all of the turbulence and heart that accompanies female friendships, sisterhood, relating to one's parents, growing apart from friends, school bullies, young love, and so much more. Morrow writes girl besties so perfectly - from the tone of their conversations, to the comfort being physically close, to the gentle teasing, to the inside jokes - it's perfection. Any girl with a best friend who is more like a soulmate will truly relate to Effie and Tavia's dynamic.

Outside of its masterful handling of culturally relevant content, Morrow also accomplishes a well-crafted fantasy. She gives us just enough information about this world without overwhelming the reader with a ton of world-building or lore. I love that Morrow chose to explore mythical beings that aren't frequently seen in literature - sirens, gargoyles, among others. These choices are just one of the many things that make ASBW feel so fresh and new, especially for readers who consume a lot of fantasy or fantasy adjacent literature.

Morrow's writing is such a treat to experience. She writes teen voices that feel incredibly realistic. Her descriptions of human emotions and experiences are so perfect that they cut deep. Some of her lines reminded me of how I feel when I read Elizabeth Acevedo's work - there's just so much heart that you can't help but feel it in your core. In a book that has so much heavy, emotional content, I enjoyed Morrow's humor that always seemed to insert itself at just the right moment. The amount of cheese is just right - I have to admit to laughing aloud once or twice.

A stunning read. An absolute success. Add this one to the YA required reading canon.

Being a black girl in today’s world means often being denied a voice. In A Song Below Water, Tavia’s voice is especially suspect. The author has taken real-life issues and isolated and magnified them through symbols, so that Tavia is a siren, and all the world is in fear of her voice and its power and so does all that it can to silence that voice. Tavia’s world looks much like our own, but with an added layer of fantastical beings–mermaids, elekos, sprites, live gargoyles, and gorgons, to name a few. Sirens are famous for controlling people through their voices and so it’s best if no one knows you’re a siren at all. A popular TV show has one siren voluntarily wearing a voice-canceling dog collar. Sirens only show up in the black, female population, so you can see why no one gets too excited when they show supernatural abilities of any sort.

On top of that, Tavia is dealing with other typical teen issues. Her relationship with her father is strained. She inherited her siren-ness from his mother, and she feels that he hates that part of her and doesn’t accept it. However, he moved the family to Portland in part for her protection. He obviously worries about her safety a lot–something that is certainly normal for a father of a teen daughter. Tavia is also dealing with first boyfriends, kisses and break-ups, and prom dates.

Tavia’s best friend, Effie, is staying with their family as the two girls navigate their junior year of high school together. Effie has her own issues. For one thing, she seems to be becoming something else entirely–but what? Her identity is a cause of great stress to her. Additionally, she carries the trauma of being the only survivor of a childhood event that left her 4 playmates turned to stone statues. Her favorite place is the RenFaire where she has longed played a mermaid, but her attempts to make RenFaire playacting into reality don’t succeed.

A Song Below Water takes place amongst issues ripped from today’s headlines–protest marches, police brutality, “say her name” chants–but it’s dealing with issues that have long plagued our world. Author Bethany Morrow does a fantastic job of making her point without being too heavy-handed or didactic, weaving together reality and fantasy into a seamless whole. The result is compulsively readable, with a fast-moving plot and sympathetic characters that build throughout this coming-of-age story. I loved this book, and have already gotten my sister-in-law to buy her own copy. Highly recommended.

A Song Below Water is a beautifully written fantasy novel that you won't want to miss. The world-building alone is reason to read it. Set in an alternate world where there are various fantasy beings living amongst humans, and where one of our two protagonists, Tavia, is a siren forced to deal with extreme bigotry at all times - this on top of her being a Black girl, one of very few in Portland, though Portland is also home to a pretty good network of sirens within the Black community - it comes as no surprise that she has her work cut out for her if she's to survive in this world. A world where a murder trial in southern Oregon is expected to end with the defendant's acquittal just because the victim was a siren. A world where Tavia inadvertently uses her voice to get out of a police stop - and attracts the wrong kind of attention from a cop whose son she knows pretty damn well. And, of course, one of the most popular reality shows in this world features a siren who willingly puts on a collar that suppresses her voice - if you could see the number of times my stomach turned over every time that came up...

Alongside Tavia in this story is her adopted sister Effie, who has played a mermaid in the local Ren Faire for years. (Well technically, it's in Vancouver across the river, but still.) Just as Tavia fears for her ability to live freely in a world that's extremely anti-Siren, Effie has these constant recurring dreams about playing Red Rover, and these kids that have long since disappeared, but may have something to do with a popular piece of local art...let's just say that the truth of Effie's identity has to be seen to be believed.

It's not a big book, but it's powerful and not to be missed, with its layers of allegory and blistering social commentary. Now, I'm going to have to find a way to get a hold of Morrow's earlier adult novel, Mem, because I'll be damned if that one doesn't look like a good story too...

Ummm, this book took me longer than I wanted to complete and way too much was going on. Nothing really fit what the description stated. Also, the lack of magical realism and mermaids made me sad. I really appreciated the topic on Black Lives Matter, but I really didn't see how it fit to the story and that whole Gargoyle thing made no sense to me. Over all I felt like the story was all over the place, nothing was focused on long enough to get the full scope of what was going on and the fairies & gargoyles just didn't fit with the stories of mermaids. I don't know, I had high hopes for this one and for the moment I’m not going to rate it.

Thanks to NetGalley, Tor Teen and Bethany C. Morrow for advanced access to this book.

What a timely book. I know books are in the works for a long time, but I picked this book up just as the Black Lives Movement gained significant momentum in the Spring of 2020. The protests in the book are centered around an otherness that has more to do with a mythical creature, but it didn't make them any less important or significant than the real-life protests occurring. It took me a little to really understand the integration of mythological creatures, but it's better to just enjoy the ride. The girls at the center of the story experience some extreme coming-of-age moments and have to learn to place their trust in themselves, not just each other. It was a very enjoyable read!

I enjoyed this book much more than I had anticipated upon first reading the description. I'm sad it took me so long to actually start reading it! It was very enjoyable!

Once I read the summary for A Song Below Water I was immediately intrigued and I wanted to read that book. Sadly I ended up being disappointed by it. Don’t get me wrong, A Song Below Water was a good book, I just expected to enjoy it a lot more than I did.

The first half of the book was slow, it took me a while to get into the story. At some points I didn’t have any idea where the story was going. The fantasy elements weren’t explored as much as I hoped they would be. I wanted to know more about the sirens and all the other magical things, but this book didn’t deliver in that aspect. A Song Below Water tackles many issues in our current society – police brutality, racial profiling, racism, sexism and many more. I loved the way the author was discussing these issues, but for a book under 300 pages there were too many issues to discuss them all in full. Some of them just felt skimmed over.

A Song Below Water is told from two characters points of view, Tavia and Effie. I had problems distinguishing between their voices, they were very similar and sometimes in the middle of the chapter I was wondering from whose perspective I was reading. I didn’t connect to the characters, they felt very flat and underdeveloped. Something that I did love about this book is the sister relationship between Tavia and Effie. I loved seeing how much they cared about each other and how far they were willing to go for the other person.

Overall, A Song Below Water wasn’t the book I expected it to be. It was a good book and I would definitely recommend it, but I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would.

A Song Below Water is a magical realism novel following sirens. The writing is beautiful. The meaning and commentary behind the sirens are beautiful. I didn't love the plot which is why I only gave it three stars. I recommend that you read some Own Voices reviews as I am a white review and this book is about black women and how the world treats them.

This book is why we need more #ownvoices reviewers.
While I enjoyed reading this book, the nuances of intersectionality between being a Black girl and this fantasy landscape would have been lost on me without reading own-voices reviews.

All that to say, I cannot speak to the experience of reading this as a Black woman (I am White). I am hesitant to even share my thoughts because I know I will have missed some of the nuances of this book. So, what I will say is this, if a book that explores coming into your own, finding your voice, a relationship between sisters and how this intersects with being Black in a White city AND with a unique mythos in the background sound interesting, you will enjoy this. I did.

Another point I wanted to address is what expectations to have going into this book. I have heard this described as a tale about mermaids. This is not true. Also, you are thrown into the world and a lot of the book is figuring out how this world works, while getting to know these sisters. It took a few chapters to get a handle of what is going on, but after that, it really flowed. One more thing is that (to me) this felt more of a character-driven novel. While there were definitely things that happened and moved the plot, they were not always expounded upon and the focus was always more on the sisters and it's effect on them.

Overall, I'd rate this 3.5 stars.

Thank you to Macmillan for this advanced readers copy.

Reasons to Read A Song Below Water:

Let me repeat: Black, own voices fantasy that is unfortunately relevant to the reality of our world today. Along with A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, The Gilded Ones, and others on the Love Yo Shelf to-read list, A Song Below Water is one of the much-awaited Black fantasy stories for YA in the world. Growing up, I didn’t see many fantasy stories starring BIPOC, and Black womxn as protagonists wasn’t something I remember seeing at all. This is not to say that they didn’t exist ten years ago! But when it came to what was on the shelves at my mainly Asian middle school, diverse fantasy came in the form of White girl with powers she didn’t want but still managing to be the hero. Now let me be clear, I’m not recommending it for the pure reason of it being Black-centered fantasy, although I’m gonna tell you right now that you need more of it in your life. The fantasy aspect is so ingeniously written that it makes magic feel not so far away. If you’re like me and hope that when you finish a book, the magic is somehow real and you’ve been awakened by reading the book, this is perfect (she says, singing in the shower, pretending she’s a siren).
2. Mythology and supernatural creatures in contemporary context. This goes along with #1, but the worldbuilding around sirens and elokos and gargoyles in Portland??? I’m sorry, I just could not help but laugh and smile at both the contemporary descriptions of Portland and the PNW, and the underlying magical elements that were right below it. It was the kind of storytelling that builds up and you learn little things about the supernatural world as they come into play instead of throwing all the info at you at once. And one of my favorite parts was that it felt so well-researched. There were little nuances about each creature that I didn’t know before, but still felt exactly right. ALSO, the fact that Bethany uses mythology to illustrate a supernatural hierarchy AND apply that to a racial hierarchy?? Shit is top tier. In this world, sirens are exclusively Black women and nobody knows why. Sirens are also the only supernatural beings with government-created power-neutralizing devices, and the only ones who inspire fear on such a large scale. The story starts with the murder of Rhoda Taylor, who is never actually confirmed as a siren, but the moment that she is suspected of being one, it suddenly becomes (even more) justification for her murder. On the other hand, elokos like Tavia’s (White) kind-of-ex-boyfriend and his crew are beloved and able to exist publicly. I dare someone to tell me that that those stereotypes don’t sound familiar.

3. Collective AND individual character identity development. The relationship between Tavia and Effie is officially one of my favorites (right next to Laila and Zofia – if you know, you know). From the very beginning, it’s clear that they both rely on each other for some sense of stability, but as each faces their own issues, their identity changes and so does their relationship with each other. Rather than using those individual issues to separate them, Bethany uses that to fuel their connection to each other. They both understand that they can never fully understand, but it doesn’t stop them from trying and being there! I cannot tell you how emotional this book made me, from identity development, to the cruel, harsh realities of the marginalized groups, to learning how to find and make a home in other people. It was such a good representation of growing together and apart, and still figuring out how to make it work for both Tavia and Effie.

4. Learning to come to terms with – and embrace – an initially unwanted identity. This was definitely the bit that got me the most. Tavia hates being a siren, and she even goes as far as trying to take her voice herself. For much of the book, she’s trying to find her grandmother to ask her to take the power away from her. Tav’s disgust with her power doesn’t even come from just herself of the world’s fear of sirens, but her own father’s fear of her. To make things worse, he keeps Tav away from her grandmother, so she never learns how to use her powers, but that also means she never learns to control them. Eventually, with the siren trials going on with Rhoda Taylor, Tavia finds the power to use her voice instead of hiding it, effectively debunking the myth that marginalized people are somehow voiceless when in actuality, they’ve been terrorized and vilified into suppressing it *stares at hidden camera and mouths “America”*. On the other hand with Effie, she doesn’t know exactly what she is, just that she has a past that keeps on haunting her, and that Eupehmia the Mer (the character she plays at the Ren faire) is the perfect way to suppress what she’s actually becoming. Herself. Effie doesn’t know what she is, and fears what she could become, while Tavia fears what she is and longs to be anything else. AKA, the perfect pairing in a journey of self-discovery.

3.5 stars Positive, lovely. There's a lot to unpack and the commentary on the lives of black Americans in thr modern US is needed . The characters weren't my cup of tea but not badly done, just not for me. The allegory felt heavy-handed to me, but, knowing that I'm not the intended audience, I think teens will appreciate it