This book starts with a fantastic idea, has a shocking and eye-popping ending, but it's very average otherwise.

weird, brutal, raw. I loved it so much. Teenage girls are amazing. This felt so real and so deep and I will never forget it.

3.5 stars. Thank you to Net Galley and William Morrow for the ARC in in exchange for my honest review. This is a bit of an odd story (I saw several reviews that likened it to David Lynch story) about young women and their changing bodies, the pressures that are put on them by family and society, immigration and trying to find belonging, sexuality and longing, and trying to become who they really are. Ren is a swimmer. She has a fascination with mermaids and once she's in the water at 10 years old, she believes she's finally becoming herself -- a mermaid. She has a coach, Jim, who pushes her very hard; a father who leaves for China for business and says he'll come back when she achieves a certain swimming time (probably just to appease Ren with no intent of returning) creating more pressure on her. She tries to find her place among her peers although she's the only Asian/Chinese American on her swim team and we learn of a friend Cathy (through letters in Cathy's voice) sporadically through the telling not really knowing how she'll affect the story line and if she's possibly more than a friend. All of this comes to a head at an important swim meet where scouts will be present. Ren makes a shocking decision which determines the second half of the story. This story was a bit out there for me but it was good to experience something different from an Asian writer's perspective.

DNF @ 30%

The premise picked my interest plus I found the concept unique. However the execution left to be desired. I read till 30% to see if anything happened yet the plot felt all over the place. In addition, I wasn't fan of the character development (if there was any). Unfortunately this book didn't work for me.

Ren Yu grew up with tales of mermaids — not the cute Disneyfied ones, but the monsters who lure men to their deaths. When she becomes a competitive swimmer, she feels herself drawn to the water in strange ways and feels she might be a humanoid sea monster too. It's a creepy, atmospheric novel that lures you in with beautiful prose and drowns you in horror in the end. I've never read anything quite like it, and I'm sure to think of it any time a smell chlorine.

I looked forward to this release as I love an unhinged woman book, but this one just didn’t work for me. I enjoyed the coming of age parts of the novel, but found the mermaid parts to be not quite believable; it felt like it was trying too hard to be unhinged without the rationale to support the choices the main character makes. Some of the writing was just cringe-inducing (“how selfish I was. But I was meant to be selfish - my self, meeting the fish”). The letters from Cathy seemed like a way to insert exposition rather than believable letters from a friend/lover.

I know a lot of people are enjoying this one, and I'm very happy that it's reaching people, but this book just wasn't it for me. I struggled with almost every aspect-- the way it's narrated, the relationships, Cathy's letters, the ending.... I mean, maybe I'm missing something because I've never been part of the competitive swimming world, but even still there were other things that just didn't jive. I couldn't get on board with how Ren speaks (in dialogue and narration). Also cringed my way through the whole section on getting her period, which was honestly just far too long. The whole mermaid bit ended up feeling a bit rushed by the time all of that came around as well.

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for the free e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Ren Yu (literally 人鱼) is a competitive swimmer, a straight A student, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, a girl in a homoerotic friendship with her best and only friend -- she is all of these things, and most importantly, she is a mermaid.

This is a novel about girlhood shedding into womanhood, about being burdened with untenable amounts of pressure, about being in forced into inappropriate and unbearable situations, and the unimaginable lengths sought to make those human problems a thing of the past. The novel balances on a very thin precipice of reality and delusion; through Ren's eyes we follow her descent, with just enough insight from other people to put into perspective how much true madness has seeped in. Her journey unfolds slowly, but also all at once.

I don't typically read body horror, so I have no barometer to say how intense the body horror is in Chlorine. For me, this was a lot, and I physically cringed and felt uncomfortable in my own skin as I read certain scenes. I didn't want to read it, but also needed to continue to know.

This skims on the surface of the fantastical. It bows at the altar of legends and myths about mermaids of all shapes and cultures, and Ren's transcendence to her truest self is treated as immutable fact.

I'm not quite sure if I enjoyed this. I'm not quite sure I completely understood this. Song is a fantastic writer, and I am excited to see what they create next.

For Ren Yu, her life as a human was survived rather than savored. And throughout this book, I sometimes felt like I was surviving rather than savoring it. Jade Song writes an unnervingly intimate coming-of-age story of a high school swimmer and the years of abuse she endures to feel alive in the embrace of the water. CHLORINE may have mythical elements and the alluring gleam of a mermaid tail on its cover, but it dwells in the searing reality of the widespread abuse student athletes face from their coaches that I have seen many times in real life, like peers needing surgeries on their joints and ligaments from high school sports, just to be able to gain a coveted athletic scholarship to college. Ren in particular has to strive to be the best—she already has strikes against her as a daughter of immigrants, her financial instability, and her father's absence as he sends money back from China. We see the way this social isolation and single-minded dedication to perfection leads to the parasitic advances of her coach, the star swimmer on the boys team, and the longterm effects of her trauma that lead her to start formulating a plan to leave her human life behind. As an unreliable narrator, we never really know where the fantasy begins and ends—her visions of the sea begin with a head injury that never really heals, only her disembodied voice narrates the events leading up to her departure. This is a book about pain and how it's inscribed into the bodies and minds of young women.

So unique, heart wrenching, and intriguing! I completely agree with all the comparisons to The Pisces, but felt even more connected to the sapphic themes in Chlorine. There is so much to be said about the ways that identity is explored in this story, and how it relates to your environment and desires. I thoroughly enjoyed Chlorine in all its sharpness and nastiness!

Very lovely, rich prose that elevates the strange nature I found displayed in the headspace of the character. I had a hard time being drawn in, but found myself struck by lines all the same. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity with the title.

“Forget what you know about mermaids,” Jade Song writes in the opening page of her debut novel, “Chlorine.” The following 200 pages of this slim book live up to this first-page intrigue. While “Chlorine” centers around a mermaid who narrates its story, the novel is far from a fairytale or Disney movie — it’s a brilliantly unsettling exploration of toxic competition, unhealthy power dynamics, and all of the messy grotesqueries of teenage girlhood.

Wow, this is an AMAZING debut. I can see what it was compared to Han Kang's The Vegetarian, another book that I really love. Thank you for the early read!

What a weird book! I really liked the insight into a girl finding herself and dealing with the pressures to be perfect. A good look at competitive athletes. There is a gory scene. I’m still not sure what it all meant but I couldn’t stop reading this!

This kind of book is my absolute favorite. It's one where, when you try to recount it to friends who don't read like you do, you watch their face contort into confusion and disbelief as they try to grasp its absurdity. Definitely will be rereading.

This was an interesting story that combined that magic of mermaids with the real life struggles of mental health. The main character is very unlikeable but you want to keep reading about her because of the way she views the world. There is very graphic body horror at the end for anyone who can't read that type of story.

Lyrical and creepy, CHLORINE is a memorable debut from an author whose next book I'm now very interested in seeing. It deals ably with its themes--among them coming of age, sexuality, perfectionism and otherness--and I'd recommend this as YA crossover, as well as to adult readers who like their feminist and queer horror on the literary side.

Wow. This is the most gruesome yet beautifully written novel I have ever read. It is so shocking and devastating to go alone the journey of not being able to be true to yourself for so long. This is so much more than you’d ever think this book could even be.

This one was just not it for me, but it seems to be for others, which is awesome!

I just really didn't like the main character or her speaking patterns.
I thought the entire section on her period was super bizarre, and I felt like the writing jumped around a lot and felt disjointed and overly immature, even for a teen/preteen.
The constant emphasis on getting her tail, felt like badgering and would have been so much better if she had used the writing tool of "show don't tell" instead of constantly reiterating the exact same thing over and over. I was getting super sick of it.
I also thought that if someone was going to have their legs sewn together, they wouldn't ask as blasé as this character did, she was talking about it the same way someone might mention the inconvenience of a hangnail. Which was kind of bothersome to me, but maybe they were trying to keep the horror to a minimum or something for some reason. I don't know.

Anyways, there's always an audience for something, and I know a lot of other people are loving this novel, and power to them.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Chlorine by Jade Song spins a raw and captivating story about a teenage competitive swimmer's pursuit to become a mermaid … at whatever the cost.

The writing is literary and introspective and depicts the literal blood, sweat, and tears that go into swimming while exploring queer yearning and mermaid myths across different cultures.

Back then, I was a girl, a body of water, a liminal state of being, a hybrid on the cusp of evolution.
Now, I am Ren Yu.
I am 人鱼.
I am person fish.
I am mermaid.
And so goes my tale of becoming. Are you ready?

However, as a result of the writing style, I did find this one to be a bit of a slow burn.

It might boil down to personal preference, but I wish there was more “symptoms” of Ren’s metamorphosis interwoven throughout the story. It’s not until the climax that we get grisly and nausea-inducing body horror along the lines of The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black or Tusk. That part was gross and fantastic in the best possible way!

I just wish we could have gotten more.