This book is set on the fictional island of Mu where in the past twins have been forbidden to walk on the island and murdered at birth. All this years later forbidden twins Kaori and Kairi are the first twins to survive infancy on this ancient island. Gender is fluid and instead of the usual pronouns they use Mu/Mir/Mem. One twin was born of fire and the other of water. An ancient prophecy is the reason no other twins have been allowed to survive due to the elders being haunted by the twin catastrophe of a volcano and a tsunami. The twins cannot stand each other and as rivalry and hatred spill from them will the ancient prophecy come true?
This book is aimed at young adults and I found it very confusing to understand the pronouns. Sometimes the story was difficult to understand due to this and I often found myself struggling to get through the book.
Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

Beneath the Burning Wave was definitely unique and I haven't read a book like this before. I really enjoyed the twins dynamic as I am one myself. I enjoyed the worlding building and how the characters interacted with each other.

I feel as if this had a lot of potential and whilst the characters and action was interesting, they just missed the mark a bit too much for me. The plot was fine but it could have been done better. The writing was good for the most part but i just found it didn't grab me. I liked how the characters were written and described and the representation was good but overall this was missing something for me.

I wanted to love this, but I just couldn’t really get into it. Interesting concept in a world that needed to be built out slightly more. It relies heavily on character to move the plot, but the characters themselves are a bit flat. Left me feeling overall univested.

I ended up DNFing about halfway through because the actual story is basically unreadable. I was really looking forward to this book because it seemed like such a cool premise and (admittedly this misunderstanding is on me) I though it was about the lost island continent by the same name. If it was supposed to be the latter, then it was only a fleeting allusion.



This was an experimental story, the focus of which was on the genderfluidity of the society of Mu where neonatal pronouns are used as a norm and no differentiation is made between genders. I've seen similar ideas explored in some fantastic sci-fi novels which really push thought provoking new considerations and deal with the subject in a nuanced and coherent way. This book did not. It was confused to the point of incoherence. And in case you think it was the pronouns - mu, mer, mem - I was having difficulty with, I can assure you that that was an easy switch IN SPITE of the way the author wrote. Although I'll admit that after yet another rambling sentence which seemed to only flirt with basic sentence structure, the impact of changing all the pronouns lost it's punch and began to seem rather silly in this context.



This is an experiment which failed. The world building is very week and the author has failed to extend her imagination beyond typical gender roles despite everyone being gender fluid. Which brings me to my second point. Perhaps I understand something different by the term gender fluid but it seems to me that the term embraces the idea that we all have varying degrees of female, male and everything else within our psychological make up. Some people are pulled more towards one polarity than another, some slide up and down the scale, and some even sit off the scale somewhere else. All of this is normal and separate from biological sex. But what you've got here is a society that is agender: they don't recognise gender constructs and they try (and fail horribly) not to recognise biological sex (which opens a whole can of worms about sexual attraction which I am just not going to get into.) My point is, without the perceived norm of polarities, there is no sliding scale, and no sitting off to one side of it. So the entire argument becomes defunct. At which point, the story flags because it's been made such a centre piece. Or at least, that's how it read to me.



The rest of the plot - one of sibling rivalry where spoiler alert, the sibling with a penis is on the road to a fully misogynistic society of mer own - is pretty basic and pedestrian. There wasn't enough decent characterisation or nuance to keep my interest.



I hate DNFing. I don't like to dislike books, especially someone's debut. And this book did not annoy me, it just left me baffled as to what story the author was actually trying to tell. Honestly I think maybe the author had some big ideas which could have really paid off, but this book fell into the category of 'subject currently outstrips your skill level'. Books have their own time to be written and this was written too soon for her command of the craft.

I really wanted to like this one, but unfortunately it wasn’t for me. I appreciated what the author was trying to do with gender fluidity, but I couldn’t connect with any of the characters and the story sadly fell flat. I did really like the world building though, and the author is obviously a very talented writer. I’m sure this book will find the right people. Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and author, for a chance to read and review this book.

‘Is Gender necessary?’.  This was the title of an essay written by Ursula K.  Le Guin (1929-2018) in 1976 with a revised version in 1988.   I know I have talked about Le Guin before on this blog but she was (and is) important.  Don't just take my word for it.

Maria Popova on The Marginalian blog calls Le Guin:

“One of the most important authors of our time..."

who

"...  has influenced such celebrated literary icons as Neil Gaiman and Salman Rushdie.”

I wanted to read this particular essay to give myself some context and perspective for my review of, Beneath The Burning Wave : The Mu Chronicles  Book One  by Jennifer Hayashi Danns, which is all about gender pronouns.  Sadly I was not able to read it as the essay is behind a paywall.

But I had better luck with another essay of Le Guin's about gendered pronouns, entitled

'Introducing Myself' The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on The Writer, The Reader and The Imagination.  


“So, when I was born, there actually were only men.  People were men.  They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am.  I am the generic ‘he’ as in , “if anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,’ or “a writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.”. That’s me.  The writer, him. I am a man”

We are 50 years on from Ursula Le Guin’s Gethenians, a race who inhabited her book The Left Hand of Darkness, an androgynous race – neither male nor female – who yet for a short period each year become one or the other,  adopt male or female characteristics including pregnancy and birth.  Given the timings it is reasonable to say that although she was a science fiction and fantasy writer, the author knew it was a matter of time before these themes became neither the stuff of science fiction nor the stuff of fantasy.

In the end feminists gave Le Guin a hard time for failing to be sufficiently courageous in her ideas although exactly what such ‘sufficient courage’ would have looked like I’m not sure.  I understand she claimed in 'Is Gender Necessary?' that the book had never been intended to be ‘about’ these things,   that the real subject of The Left Hand of Darkness was not feminism or sex or gender but that these were the things that drew people's attention.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, they continue to do so.

We still don't have an answer to the question that Le Guin posed,  but we have a great many increasingly militant arguments about it.  After beating about this particular feminist bush  I come now to the book under review , a new YA fantasy Book one of three, Beneath The Burning Wave : The Mu Chronicles  Book One  by Jennifer Hayashi Danns, which is all about gendered pronouns.

The author, Jennifer Hayashi Danns,  says in her note at the beginning of The Burning Wave “the book explores the origin of gender and the story begins with neopronouns.  The Maymuan people use mu/mem/mir.

A neopronoun means a new pronoun.  Aka, a made-up pronoun.  That’s fine - this is fiction after all - but I couldn’t help thinking that a work which tossed about such a political hot potato would have more of a philosophy behind it.   And is there any difference between calling everyone ‘mu’ and calling everyone ‘he’?

We are now in an age of gender fluidity of trans rights of cancel culture and opprobrium being heaped on famous authors who claim that biological sex matters.  I have no intention of being drawn into that argument.

So to the plot, or the bit of it that I understood.

Twins Kaori and Kairi, are born on the island of Mu.  They have some inherent powers whereby one controls fire, and one water.  As in Harry Potter, the Matrix and numerous other fantasy stories there is a prophecy but there the similarity ends.  Not much magic happens in these pages and no-one downloads into their brain an entire lifetime’s study of kung-fu.    As the twins Kaori and Kairi, grow they become more and more competitive in the exercise of their powers which as a reader you feel can’t end well and sure enough it doesn’t.    This  is some kind of power struggle.    It’s closer to Gormenghast  in influence than the famed stories I have mentioned above; but even Steerpike might run screaming from this lot.  Where is the empathy, where the vulnerability of these people?

This is a very violent book.  There is hardly a scene where something grisly isn’t happening to someone.   Ironically,  in the midst of all the mayhem, an almost comic use by the characters of the expression ‘ratty’ as in ‘where the ratty hell is' so and so.  Or  ‘I wish I wasn’t stuck on this stupid, ratty island…’ sounded to me like something that one of the Famous Five might have said.

Question: does violence in literature (art, TV, film, etc) give people ‘a safe space’ to explore themes of violence or does it just normalise ideas of violence?

But the idea of gender is to the fore when reading because the neopronouns continually beat one over the head,  so it is to that which I turn to make sense of the story.  Is the book 'about' gender or is this just a side issue for a story whose main thrust is prophecy and power and a whole host of other fantasy tropes?  That was the question I was trying to answer as I read.

Mu is supposed to be an island of no gender.  Those that give birth are called ‘carriers’, a gender neutral term, sure.  It seemed to me as I read it that it was more an island of no gendered pronouns.    In the second half of the book, of the twins makes a break for freedom.  Then gendered pronouns appear. Just like that someone has decided that instead of the ‘mu’ and there will be ‘he’ and ‘she’.   I didn’t get as far as discovering whether the ‘carriers’ were now ‘she’.  By this stage I was too confused.

Question:  is this the origin of gender? Or the origin of a linguistics of gender. Here - it seems to me -  is no gender fluidity but arguments about naming.  Le Guin herself believed in the overwhelming power in a name.  She wrote her whole Earthsea series around it.  I am 'he' therefore I am a man.

If you feel there are more questions than answers in this article, I can only agree with you.  I was disappointed in this book having looked forward to reading it.  There is a second and third book due eventually so perhaps all will become clear (and less violent) later on.

Thank you to Net Galley and to publisher Harper Collins for approving me for a review copy of Beneath the Burning Wave.

I got confused while reading this. Maybe I am cannot enjoy ya anymore since it is so focused on identity politics now . Interesting world at least. Just felt eh

This was a hard book to read. I loved the premise, but I feel as though the book fell short. It had the potential to be great, but I don't think I fully understood what was going on in the story.

On the island of Mu, twins are killed at birth to avoid fulfilling a prophesy that foretells the island’s ruin. However, a pair of twins named Kaori and Kairi miraculously survive. They are polar opposites, and as their rivalry intensifies and rocks the island, they must either fight against or succumb to their destiny.

At first glance, the blurb for Beneath the Burning Wave by Jennifer Hayashi Danns sounded really interesting. However, the story’s execution failed on both a technical and thematic level for me.

First off, the writing is choppy and bordering on incoherent. I think the writer wanted to give the narrators a distinctive voice, but the grammar rules of the Mu dialect aren't consistently applied. For instance, at one point Kaori narrates, "I hunt snake; mu hunt boar" even though the plural of "snakes" is written with an "s" throughout the novel.

Also, on a deeper level I feel like this book undermines its on themes. The island of Mu is supposedly a gender fluid society where "gender is as fluid as the crashing waves," and yet the islanders are entirely obsessed with delignating themselves by reproductive roles, and those who are cable of getting pregnant are simply referred to as "carriers." This felt like such a regressive way to handle things.

All and all, Beneath the Burning Wave completely missed the mark for me. There is speculative fiction that wonderfully explores and transcends gender like Octavia Butler’s Lilith's Brood trilogy and Ursula La Guinn’s Left Hand of Darkness, but sadly, this book is not one of them.

I was super excited over the premise of this title but could never get into it. I was not able to finish this as it was not for me.

Unfortunately, I really didn't enjoy this book. I found it confusing, since we're essentially just thrust into this new world and honestly, I didn't really like any of the characters, epecially Kairi, I hated reading their POV.

Also considering gender was meant to be fluid, there's a lot of emphasis on biological sex and still, somehow, those who 'bleed' or 'carry' are still seen as inferior.

Maybe its just because I am elderly but I did find this book difficult to follow. I could not understand why if gender is as fluid as the waves ( but strongly defined by biology ) why women were considered almost a lesser species there only to produce children while men held the power. I also did not like the homophobic aspects . This did bother me and rather spoilt the interesting and complex storyline. Overall I think that it was an interesting book and would probably read this authors books again.

Thanks to @netgalley
& Jennifer Hayashi Danns for the #gifted e-Advanced Reader Copy

This is a really unique YA-fantasy novel. I just loved what it was trying to do. Whilst it might not be for everyone I do think it's worth a go for the unique style 👌

This book follows Kaori and Kairi - the first twins to survive infancy on the ancient island of Mu, where gender is as fluid as the crashing waves. One was born of fire, the other of water. But there's a reason they're the first to survive....

What I loved 😍
❤️ that there are trigger warnings & a pronunciation guide for the 2 lead characters
❤️ the gender neutral pronouns
❤️ the fusion of Japanese & Egyptian mythology
❤️ the setting
❤️ the representstion

I struggled slightly to keep up with the narrative and engage with the storyline, but... I think there's a certain beauty to the story & the way it's constructed that makes it worth a go!

I must admit I found this a rather confusing read. The use of the Mu and Mir pronouns detracted from the story somewhat. I really enjoyed the twins story though - both fascinating characters I was willing then to find their own strength and courage in such a world.

This is now the second book I’ve read this year where an author has promised to explore how society forms when the modern understanding of gender roles is re-interpreted and immediately decides to regress to a strict cisnormative society.

Beneath the Burning Waves piqued my interest with the single line “gender is as fluid as the crashing waves”. I’m always fascinated by how authors explore gender in society, especially once the barrier of binary gender roles is removed or re-interpreted. Outside of all characters using the same set of neo-pronouns mu/mem, roles on the island of Mu are strictly divided by biological sex. Only those with penises are allowed to become “experienced”, or the leaders of this society, as “carriers”, or those with wombs, are intended to focus on producing more children (maymu) for society. Cis couples are paired together by the Experienced and they used to go through a lottery system to decide who would be encouraged to produce children together, tho currently after a famine all couples are encouraged to “Create”. Naturally, sex outside of maymu creation is heavily discouraged.

Additionally, I found the writing and dialogue to be incredibly confusing, often finding myself re-reading paragraphs to make sure I didn’t miss some context. Characters seemed to be at one location, then another, then suddenly doing something else entirely, sometimes with unlabeled timeskips. The internal monologues felt so choppy and disorienting, partially due to really simple sentence structure that I felt a hard time following anything the characters thought.

Overall, I rate this book a 2/5. The summary offered a lot of potential for a genderfluid society and some interesting worldbuilding, but none of that was delivered.

This is incredibly poorly written, with simplistic language, shallow characters, and a complete failure of worldbuilding. Burning Wave is supposed to feature a nonbinary society, but despite everyone using neopronouns, people are still divided by biological sex, with forced roles for those who can become pregnant, aka ‘carriers’.

<A seventeen orbit carrier without a maymu is a freak.>

(Seventeen orbit = seventeen years old, maymu = baby.)

When talking about sexual attraction, one character puts it thus

<I think I prefer my opposite rather than my same.>

Hi – you have completely failed to create a nonbinary, or genderfluid, society. It’s actually kind of embarassing. When you discard the male/female binary, there is no longer any concept of ‘opposites’. So it makes absolutely no sense for your characters to think about it this way.

I was also pretty unhappy that the characters are clearly coded traditionally masculine and feminine, and that it’s the XY characters who have ‘male’ traits and the XX ones who are feminine. Seriously? Not only does your allegedly genderfluid society divide people by sex, you couldn’t be bothered to explore or experiment outside traditional gender roles? Why use neogenders and nonbinary pronouns if you’re just going to replicate the cisheteronormative system???

Other reviewers have mentioned that the writing is incredibly confusing. This is very much the case. I was rarely able to understand the reasoning or motivations behind anyone’s actions, and at times the writing just dissolved into the nonsensical.

<I don’t want to live anymore anyway. I am already dead. You all buried me. I am free. I am your fear. I am the air. The sky. The dying. The dead. You are all living in my tomb. I am outside breathing while you suffocate in my stench. Look at you. Your sanctimony. You feast on willing, weak minds to elevate your own sick soul. I am you. You are me. I am half of nothing. You are nothing. Truth is not in this chamber. No one in this chamber seeks truth. You are not judging me. You are judging yourself. You would do what I do if you had the guts. Instead, you are submerged in stagnant red pools. You pretend to be horrified but I see your pleasure. It drips down your legs. Lick it up. It is as close to escape as you will get. I am the horizon. The point of no return. You can finish me but I will begin again.>

This isn’t the speech of a god, or someone communing with some kind of spirit, or even someone intoxicated: this is the inner monologue of one of the main characters when they are brought before the ‘court’ on charges.

Um???

On top of that, the author has filled the book with invented words, without ever explaining what those words mean. Is this noun an animal, vegetable, or mineral? I have no idea. Because characters were described as ‘curling up like a coco’ multiple times, I was picturing some kind of small animal, but eventually I worked out that it’s actually some kind of fruit or nut. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either – who curls up like a nut? And there are dozens of other terms where it was never clear if the characters were referring to an insect or rodent or maybe a big cat???

This next part isn’t down to bad writing, exactly, just extremely unpleasant: one of the two main characters is a sadist who really, really despises ‘carriers’, and wow it was not fun being in their head.

<I don’t like carriers. I think they are pathetic for letting a maymu take their purpose…They don’t seem to live as long as Maymuans and even if they did they are never allowed to become Experienced.>

Experienced = elders, the governing body of this society. So this genderfluid culture still manages to be sexist towards anyone without a penis. Why???

There are also a lot of scenes involving violence towards animals. I appreciated the author including a content warning for this; however, it seemed hugely gratuitous: at one point a character is walking in the woods and without looking, randomly punches an owl off its branch.

…Why? We already know this character is a villain. You really don’t need to have them punching owls to underline it for us. It’s so stupid it almost becomes funny. Why would anyone punch a random owl? It makes no sense, especially in a culture where you can face the death penalty for killing an animal. But the characters don’t even comment on it, never mind explain it.

To go back to bad writing: it is a bad idea to give your main characters almost identical names. Other reviewers have talked about not being able to hear the difference on the audiobook, and I can tell you that even reading the names on a page, they’re easy to mix up. Writers, please don’t do this.

Finally, I learned that the sadist character is going to set up their own society and it will be misogyny central. I was going to DNF this book already, but when I heard that…I just cannot even.

I read 32%, and it was 32% too much.

This was an ambitious take on an epic YA fantasy series exploring gender fluidity with elements of Egyptian and Japanese culture being infused in the story. I'd originally even thought the book was an adult fantasy series rather than YA, due to its complex worldbuilding and how different it was!

Twins Kaori and Kairi are two sides to the same coin, two halves of a whole, and the only twins to be born to an island, foretold to be it's ruin. The premise of the story and the worldbuilding was intriguing, but the first section of the book did confuse me when I read it, mainly because the reader isn't slowly introduced to these elements, but rather, is thrown into the deep end.

Thankfully by the midpoint of the book, I was able to comprehend the situation and plots afoot, however there were certain choices made that I was a little disappointed by. For one, considering how genderfluid the characters are meant to be, they seem to be stuck within a fairly heteronormative society with homophobia clearly evident.

Even when Kairi forms their own society, he changes and creates new pronouns that further emphasise the gender differences, looking down on women and elevating men. I had hoped due to the genderfluid setting that this wouldn't have been something prevalent in the book, however I understand that Danns may have made this choice as a political commentary.

My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

TL;DR: If you're looking for an atypical YA read, this might be the one for you.

Highlights: queer MCs/romances

Kaori and Kairi are the first twins to survive infancy on the ancient island of Mu, where gender is as fluid as the crashing waves. One was born of fire, the other of water.
But there’s a reason why none have survived before. A prophecy that has haunted the elders since time began. A rivalry destined to sink the entire island beneath a twin catastrophe of volcano and tsunami.
As hatred spills from the forbidden twins like the deadly poison of sacrificed sea snakes, they must decide what matters to them most…
The fight for the island – for tradition and duty.
Or the fight for freedom – for love and light.
This storyline was very interesting and flowed nicely, I will definitely recommend reading this book!

Beneath the Burning Wave is a strange one, because I do think it has potential to be a thoughtful and lyrical little work. The problem is I never really felt like I understood what was going on, because a lot of events and relationships are left to implication. The sparse writing style and short chapters could work well, but I just didn't feel like the balance was right between what was explained and what was just mentioned. The use of neopronouns is lovely to see and was not at all hard to process, but how they were used is a little odd. The depicted society still distinguishes between a binary of biological sex and has social requirements for that, so this is not at all about non-binary or genderfluid identity. The book more explores how cis men and women begin united and how that breaks down - an interesting theme, but not a radically queer one. Unfortunately just not the book I was hoping from the premise.