The Deep

Confession time: I tend to be picky about mermaid stories because life under the sea is such a dramatic difference from our reality that it’s often hard to really reflect that difference. In this book, you never forget that these people aren’t human, and you never lose their connection to the sea. It’s everywhere, from the way they think about distances to their relationships with the other creatures around them to the way Yetu’s disabilities are handled.

In the same way, the trauma that created their people was always lingering at the forefront of my mind as I read, even… show more.

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. 

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,… show more.