The Deep

By Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson , Jonathan Snipes

Book cover of The Deep

Book description

WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY LGBTQ SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY/HORROR AWARD

The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society-and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award-nominated song "The Deep" from Daveed…

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Why read it?

4 authors picked The Deep as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I know the plot of this book sounds really bleak and upsetting, but it truly opened up new waves of compassion and community care for me. I felt like I was reading an opera, and all of the deep sea and magical elements unfurled themselves before my eager eyes.

I felt humbled after taking it all in and inspired to open my heart more. And as a theatre kid, the fact that Daveed Diggs had a hand in the story made me even more delighted.

This book is about how trauma can force you to choose between memory and sanity… and how this problem gets worse when you live in a society of telepaths.

Said telepaths are the mer-person descendants of enslaved Africans who threw themselves off the boats from Africa to the Americas, but the emotional core of the book makes the deep weirdness of the premise pretty much an afterthought. 

From Matt's list on fantasy that reimagines society.

Mermaid-like creatures called wajinru, descendants of pregnant Africans thrown overboard from slave ships, choose one girl as a "historian" to carry the terrible weight of their traumatic past. But the burden of the historian's role is too much for one autistic wajinru to handle. This Nebula award-winning book goes to dark places, but emerges with a sense of community, healing, and hope.

You must know at least one mermaid story, but I doubt it spans distance and history as thoroughly as The Deep. This novella demonstrates that first, the ocean is huge and unexplored enough to believably hide an underwater civilization, and second, memories do strange things to us, whether we forget them or think about them every day. Rivers weaves together the vast emptiness of the sea interrupted by bubbles of unique life with the vast emptiness of time punctuated by major and minor events in a magical and painfully poignant story I read in three days (which is fast,…

From R. E.'s list on looking at the familiar differently.

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