A Song Below Water

Legacies meets Nic Stone’s Dear Martin in Bethany C. Morrow's debut YA, A Song Below Water, about two best friends discovering their magical identities against the challenges of today’s racism and sexism.

Tavia is already at odds with the world, forced to keep her siren identity under wraps in a society that wants to keep her kind under lock and key. Nevermind she's also stuck in Portland, Oregon, a city with only a handful of black folk and even fewer of those with magical powers. At least she has her bestie Effie by her side as they tackle high school drama, family secrets, and unrequited crushes.

But everything changes in the aftermath of a siren murder trial that rocks the nation; the girls’ favorite Internet fashion icon reveals she's also a siren, and the news rips through their community. Tensions escalate when Effie starts being haunted by demons from her past, and Tavia accidentally lets out her magical voice during a police stop. No secret seems safe anymore—soon Portland won’t be either.

Many thanks to JeanBookNerd and Tor Teen for an ARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review and for inclusion on this blog tour. Quotes are taken from an unfinished version and may differ from the final product.

Even before the world went crazy and people actually started paying attention to these things, I knew I had to read this book. I mean, first, there’s two stunning black girls on the cover, and I’ve been wanting to see more of that ever since I was a little black girl who never got to see anyone who looked like her in pretty much anything. But more than that, this book felt important … and it was. For many reasons.

At its core, A Song Below Water, is about finding one’s voice in a world that has systematically enforced silence, in a world that’s repeatedly said, “The voices of people like you are dangerous.” It’s a powerful narrative, spun masterfully in a unique fantasy setting.

I’m going to be upfront and say, right off the bat, that contemporary isn’t really my thing. I’m not a huge fan of the tropes, and it’s usually so slow to me, because I really want action and intrigue. Still, I liked it, despite that, so do with that what you will.

This book reads more like a contemporary with fantasy elements thrown in, so I would definitely recommend it more to those who trend towards reading contemporary.

Really, this book reads like a thinly veiled allegory, where obvious parallels are drawn between this fantasy world and real life. While reading it, there are things that alluded to national news events in a rather heavy-handed way, so I doubt someone could miss them. But then there were the subtleties … and oh, how wonderfully they came together. Because microaggressions are a thing, and I don’t think a lot of people realize that.

What I loved about this setting is that I think sometimes real-world struggles benefit from being taken out of the real world and transformed into allegory. It eases a person’s knee-jerk, defensive reaction in a way that often lets them actually think about what they’re reading in a more detached way, rather than the immediate, real-life effect on them.

It’s actually what I love about fantasy, and it’s what I think worked so well about this book. These are based on real-life occurrences, but it’s so much easier to digest when you’re thinking about bias against sirens than something in real life.

Speaking of the sirens … the racism/prejudice in this is pretty heavy handed and hard to stomach, so if that’s a trigger, I’m going to warn about it right now.

Sirens are dangerous, because of course they are. Their voices are dangerous, and they have to be silenced because of it. Which would make so much sense … if not for the fact that elokos have a similar charming power, and they’re seen as pillars of the community. They just don’t all happen to be black. I thought this distinction was so well done, that creatures with similar powers could be treated so differently by society, simply because of a narrative in history so old that no one really remembers its origin.

Make no mistakes, though, some of the things you’ll read in this book should churn your stomach, because they were just … not cool.

That’s an understatement for it, but I don’t think there are adequate words to express it. The fact that these things happen to everyday people in real life should add another layer of outrage. As I said in the previous point, though, removing it from the real world makes it much easier to focus on the thing and not the narrative surrounding it.

Let’s talk about this world for a second, because I absolutely loved it. It’s mythical creatures layered into a real-world setting.

It’s basically contemporary plus every mythology that’s ever existed. There’s sirens and elokos and gargoyles and sprites and oracles (though they seem to have gone extinct), and it’s just really neat. It’s this interesting cross-section of fantasy and contemporary that just worked. Really well, actually.

The fantasy added an element of mystery and intrigue, as new species are revealed and the interactions among them are shown and the way society treats them.

It added a really interesting and unique layer to it all that added to some of the mystery. And there’s gargoyles! I can’t remember the last time they popped up in a book, but I happened to love the gargoyle in this.

Aside from the obvious social commentary, there is some mystery and intrigue, particularly in Effie’s story, as she tries to figure out who she is.

I’m actually not really sure how much I can say about this without revealing spoilers, so I’m going to tread very carefully here. Something happened in Effie’s past that made her well-known, but for not-so-great reasons, and she carries the guilt from it with her. Survivor’s guilt, basically. She doesn’t know why or how it happened, and that’s part of the mystery.

I was really caught up in Effie’s struggle, and once it really got going, I found it was hard to put down because I just had to know.

For me, this was the crux of the story because I do so love a good mystery to solve. Plus, the way the fantasy elements came together with this (and the way it sits in juxtaposition to the prejudice against sirens) really brought the storyline together in a unique way.

Even though this is a fantasy, what this boils down to is if you want to try to start understanding Black experience in America, this is a good place to start.

I mean, you could read nonfiction books, but nonfiction is boring and even my eyes tend to glaze over after a while, so I wouldn’t force that on anyone. What I loved about this book is that, while telling a compelling story, it slipped in little things that make up the entirety of the Black experience that I think someone may not understand or might just overlook as insignificant. When added up, though, it is significant.

I admit, I’ve never been accused of my hair not being real, so there’s that. But if I had a penny for every time I get a comment about my hair, from whether someone can touch it, to how thick it is, to how much I have, to how I take care of it, etc., I wouldn’t be blogging right now. I’d be on a private beach somewhere sipping Mai Tais. And I’m only half Black, so I can’t even imagine how much worse it would be to have traditionally Black hair as far as comments go.

This book felt so slow until about the middle of it, when Effie’s mystery really amps up.

I’m not sure if this was because this is geared towards contemporary readers and I’m a fantasy reader or what, but it didn’t work for me.

Tavia’s story of being a siren is really the important one here as far as real-world events, but it was kind of uninteresting to me. Effie’s struggle with finding her own identity was what really pulled me in, and I’m not sure the book could have stood as well without her. Though, at the same time, the fact that there were two differing struggles and storylines also meant that the story ended up being pulled in multiple different paths, and because of that, I’m not sure I got the full effect of either.

There’s so much happening in this book, that I think it suffers a little from being pulled in so many different directions.

Tavia’s storyline is heavily skewed towards racial injustice and fighting for equality, which is a super important message that I in no way want to detract from. But it was also kind of boring. Maybe that’s because I’m Black myself, so it wasn’t really new information for me. I don’t know. I just wasn’t into it. Shoehorned into this, though, was the struggles she has with her identity and her parents (which is never fully resolved and left me feeling a little annoyed) and a failed romance. Her story is very much about finding herself, which I enjoyed, particularly the whole concept of finding her voice, but I’m not the target reader for that kind of book. It just doesn’t hold my attention.

Effie’s storyline, on the other hand, was much more fantasy. There were things that happened in her past that she doesn’t understand, a father she’s never met and knows nothing about, and weird things that start happening to her that she can’t explain. This definitely caught my attention, but again, there was so much more happening that the story felt pulled in a bunch of other directions.

What it boils down to, for me, is that the story felt like it was trying to do so many things, each important in their own way, that it lacked focus.

I didn’t feel like everything was sufficiently wrapped up for me, and the ending ended up feeling rushed to a conclusion, because there was so much to try to wrap up all at once that things necessarily fell to the wayside.

I wish the world-building and character development had been a little more sound.

Yes, I loved the world, as I said, but at the same time, I was confused by parts of it. For example, elokos. They’re not really described, and I had to Google what they were, but the real-world mythology didn’t seem to match the book mythology, so even now, I don’t have a very clear picture of what they are.

More than that, in a world full of potentially dangerous mythical creatures (because who knows how many are really out there, aside from what are mentioned), why are sirens the only one persecuted so? I felt like this is where the allegory broke down, because this background just didn’t seem explained all that well.

As far as character development goes, there were a lot of characters, and I kept getting them confused, because they mostly sounded the same. This was especially true for our two point-of-view characters, Effie and Tavia.

There were times when I was reading a chapter and I had to go back to the beginning because I thought I’d been reading from one perspective, but then something that was mentioned made me realize I was wrong, so I had to go check the chapter heading again and reorient myself. It felt like both perspectives had basically the same voice, which made it kind of confusing to keep the two girls separate, and they kept blending together in my mind.

About Bethany C. Morrow

Bethany C. Morrow is a recovering expat splitting her time between Montreal, Quebec, and upstate New York - yet another foreign place. A California native, Bethany graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a BA in Sociology (but took notable detours in the Film and Theatre departments). Following undergrad, she studied Clinical Psychological Research at the University of Wales, Bangor, in Great Britain before returning to North America to focus on her literary work.

Though sociology and forensic psychology will always be among her passions, writing has been a lifelong endeavor. Whether in novels for the YA or adult market, novellas, short stories, stage plays, television pilots or short film scripts, Bethany's speculative literary fiction uses a focus on character and language to engage with, comment on and investigate worlds not unlike our own.

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View the full tour schedule at JeanBookNerd.

✦ WEEK ONE ✦
JUNE 1st MONDAY Ya It’s Lit REVIEW
JUNE 2nd TUESDAY BookHounds YA EXCERPT
JUNE 3rd WEDNESDAY Casia’s Corner REVIEW 
JUNE 3rd WEDNESDAY Sometimes Leelynn Reads REVIEW
JUNE 3rd WEDNESDAY Metaphors and Miscellanea SPOTLIGHT
JUNE 4th THURSDAY Bookishaestha REVIEW 
JUNE 5th FRIDAY Kait Plus Books EXCERPT
JUNE 5th FRIDAY J Long Books REVIEW
JUNE 5th FRIDAY Insane About Books EXCERPT

✦ WEEK TWO ✦
JUNE 8th MONDAY Nay’s Pink Bookshelf REVIEW
JUNE 9th TUESDAY Life Within the Pages REVIEW 
JUNE 10th WEDNESDAY The Bookwyrm’s Den REVIEW
JUNE 10th WEDNESDAY J.R.’s Book Reviews REVIEW JUNE 11th THURSDAY Gwendalyn’s Books REVIEW
JUNE 11th THURSDAY Emelies Books REVIEW 
JUNE 12th FRIDAY Marshmallow Pudding REVIEW 
JUNE 12th FRIDAY Movies, Shows, & Books EXCERPT
JUNE 12th FRIDAY Reading Adventures of a Book Dragon EXCERPT

✿ Open international
✿ Must be 13+ to enter
✿ Ends June 22, 2020
✿ 5 Winners will receive a Copy of A SONG BELOW WATER by Bethany C. Morrow.

*JBN is not responsible for Lost or Damaged Books in your Nerdy Mail Box*