The Deep in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Aug 20, 2021 Hannah added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2021, grownups-fiction, magic-realism-spec-fic, audio

Another audiobook I did in a single day, pretty much without interruption except when I had to take a couple phone calls. I am not a Hamilton person AT ALL, so while I obviously knew who Daveed Diggs is, I don't have much of a personal reference point to him--though apparently he and one of my cousins knew each other in high school? idk. I am now fully committed to listening to any other audiobooks he may narrate in the future. Such a soothing voice and also really great at not overdoing charact ...more

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Aug 02, 2021 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was ok

Shelves: mono-covers, fantasy-and-sci-fi, mermaids, alternate-planes-and-histories

We dive down to the deep where the second mother once dragged us. The pressure is immense and it squeezes us. We plunge through the cold, through the darkness. The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude.

This was okay. Really interesting concept, but the genesis of mermaids was sort of hand-waved, and I was super hung up on how it absolutely could not happen that way.

Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships

We dive down to the deep where the second mother once dragged us. The pressure is immense and it squeezes us. We plunge through the cold, through the darkness. The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude.

This was okay. Really interesting concept, but the genesis of mermaids was sort of hand-waved, and I was super hung up on how it absolutely could not happen that way.

Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb.

Babies born underwater do not magically form gills and fins, and there was nothing in this story to explain why these babies did form gills and fins. Similarly, nothing explained the wajinru’s ability to store and transfer memory, their hermaphroditic form, nor their ability to electrically affect the ocean and create hurricanes. I love SFF and of course it always requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but this book asked for far too much.

If only these things had been explained in some way, this book would have been phenomenal.

Also, the MC was unappealing to me - all of the secondary characters were great, but this book really hinges on Yetu, and I absolutely did not enjoy being in her head, she came across as incredibly whiney to me.

If being The Historian is such an important role in the wajinru society, why was Yetu selected, since she is so clearly unsuited to the task??? That just seemed needlessly careless and cruel. The book hand-waved something about Yetu’s sensitivity and capacity being the needed qualities, but it seemed like those things disqualified her, since she felt like she was dying under the burden.

I’m not sure why the side-story of some sort of war between the wajinru & the two-legs was included. It was never explained, the rest of the plot did not need this detail, it just muddied the waters. I wish that had been left out and instead those pages had been used to explain everything.

And, I know this is a small thing, a pet peeve just for me, but I took issue with the description of a “vulva” as “a passage that connects [the uterus to the outer body].” Can we not get it right??? So often, “vagina” is used to mean “vulva” and now in this book “vulva” is used to mean “vagina.” ...more

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