Mary: AT LONG LAST we have read A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow, and we’re prepared to talk about it. This is Morrow’s debut YA novel, and it’s tackling a lot of big issues, including racism, misogynoir, and the difficulty of being different. The book follows Tavia, a young siren in hiding, and Effie, her sister and best friend who also has some magical associations, including an event that led to the loss of her mother.
The novel takes place in a fictional Portland, Oregon, in a world where mythological creatures not only exist but are commonplace. In the news, sirens are discriminated against, targeted, and feared by others, making them a target for murder and police brutality. One important thing to note is that all sirens are Black women, although not all Black women are sirens. This adds an extra layer of intrigue to the novel, I think, because it merges our understanding of racism in the United States with our understanding of this fictional, mythical world. Do we just wanna jump in and talk about race?
Needless to say, there will be spoilers for the book in this post!
Emily: Yeah, so I think there’s an obvious message here about Black women and how Black women are treated and traditionally portrayed in the media. There are two things I want to bring up about this but I want to be careful about how I phrase this because, again, we’re white women. So I can’t directly speak to the experiences of being a Black woman. But I can try to understand. So from what I’ve witnessed and understood, Black women are often portrayed as being too angry and too loud. And at the same time, they’ve been oversexualized. I think the siren mythology symbolizes both of those things in this story. It’s also a great way to examine intersectionality when it comes to racial and gender equality and how that affects Black women. We see that mentioned pretty directly throughout the story. Especially at the protest.
Mary: Definitely. I think you’ve hit on something here; the siren mythology is often portrayed as one thing (they lure men to their graves, they’re super sexy, they’re mysterious), but Tavia turns all those ideas on their head, challenging them. Similarly, like you said, she’s conquering a lot of stereotypes that wrongfully get put on Black women. At the protest late in the book, she feels powerless to speak, even though she has every right to.
I’m really interested in the eloko, which is another kind of mythological creature featured in the novel. I’d never heard of Elokos, but it seems that they’re typically seen as pretty...bad? They definitely kill people, right? In A Song Below Water, the elokos have little cute bells that everyone thinks are charming and cute, but in the myths I’ve seen from a quick google search online, those same bells are used to lure in potential victims. I think that Morrow’s doing something really interesting here by having the elokos be so handsome and friendly in the book. It’s a nice way to adapt the myth to be similar but different, while still maintaining a great way to open up the world in later books (the second book in the series, A Chorus Rises, is coming out in June of next year).
Emily: I agree. The elokos were interesting, and I didn’t know that about them either. From the way Morrow describes them, it’s almost like the elokos are the cool kids. So yeah, very different from typical eloko mythology, from what you’ve said (and linked to). But since you mentioned the world, let’s dive into that a little bit. How did you feel about the world-building in this story?
Tavia and Effie own their magic in more ways than one! We hope they inspire other girls to do the same.
Mary: For me, the world-building worked, more or less. It seems like Morrow was going for something more subtle. The novel takes place in Portland, just regular old Portland. There’s not a fantasy world we have to wrap our heads around, just fantasy figures that are actually real. Everyone in this Portland knows about sirens and elokos, and they accept them as real and commonplace (even though sirens are stigmatized). Would we consider this magical realism? It’s hard to say. It’s almost as if everyone in the world is aware of magic, but they choose to keep that part of reality separate from them if it’s convenient to do so. For example, the elokos are popular, so no one wants to keep them segregated. They’re not victims. Instead, less desirable figures get cast aside, like sirens. All of this is tied up in race, to some degree, which just makes it more interesting. I think Morrow did a really good job building up this belief system full of mythology while still leaning on what we know about the real world and using that to the story’s advantage.
I also want to say that I liked that Effie was building her own mythology through the renaissance faire. She is trying to follow in her mother’s footsteps by being a mermaid at the faire, and she fantasizes about the group of people who get to make the stories the faire is built around. She wants to be involved and craft the mythos of the faire, which is fun. This book is, in a sense, all about storytelling.
Emily: I loved the Ren Faire stuff. And yes, I think because Effie has so many question marks surrounding her identity and her own mythology, it makes sense that she would find a way to invent and tell her own story. I wonder too if she secretly wished she were a mermaid.
And speaking of mermaids, that reminds me… a lot of the publicity for this book calls it a mermaid book. This is not a story about mermaids. Sirens and mermaids are distinctly different. And there are a whole bunch of other creatures mentioned in here as well. Like the gargoyle. If I were Bethany C. Morrow and I saw publicists trying to sell this as a mermaid book, I would be frustrated.
Mary: I think that mermaids are kind of having a moment right now, and publicists wanted to capitalize on that. I get it, but that doesn’t make it less frustrating as a reader. I actually became more excited about the book after I realized it was about sirens and not mermaids. Mermaids are cool, but sirens have such a dark mythology attached to them. I guess mermaids do, too (consider that the original Little Mermaid tale ends with the little mermaid dying because she bled to death from having her fin split in two), but sirens are much more into drowning people.
Mermaids and sirens are not the same thing, but the mermaids in Peter Pan get close. “Come back, we want to drown you!”
Emily: I also want to talk about the voices of the two main characters. As you mentioned, this is told from Tavia and Effie’s perspectives, and we alternate POVs in the different chapters. Did this work for you? I know I’m really big on voice, so maybe this was just my problem, but it took me forever to differentiate between the two characters because their voices were so similar.
Mary: I wish I could say that it didn’t matter to me, but I totally agree with you here. If the chapters hadn’t been labeled, I’m not sure that I would’ve known the difference between Effie and Tavia. Their situations are different—Effie is dealing with an entirely different set of mythological problems—but their voices are very similar. Voice is and isn’t a big deal for me. When it becomes noticeable, when I have trouble telling the characters apart? That’s not good. That being said, I liked the voice. It was just too samey.
Emily: I listened to the audiobook for this one, so that made it even harder for me. And it didn’t even help that there were two narrators because their voices sounded so similar.
Mary: One thing that really got me about this book was the ending. I didn’t really see it coming, but at the same time I did, if that makes sense. It turns out that Effie’s dad is an evil gorgon who is trying to find her and...I don’t know...make her evil, too? Everyone in Effie’s life has tried to protect her up until the end of the novel, when she has to face the truth of who her father is—and who she is as well.
Emily: Yeah, I don’t know that gorgons had been mentioned before we find out that Effie is one, so I was sort of like, “Wait, there are gorgons too?” But also I thought it was cool because all this time she’d been thinking she was a mermaid (even though she said she probably wasn’t I thought she probably was). But really she is this other creature that isn’t normally associated with beauty like mermaids are. Rather than having a dainty fish tail, she has this thick snake tail, but she and Tavia are both like, “OMG this is even more beautiful.” Which I thought was cool. I guess sort of like the eloko, we’re making gorgons cool here. Evil, but cool. We also find out that Wallace the pool boy is the gargoyle that’s been protecting her this whole time, and we see a romance starting up there. Which felt kind of… standard YA romance, but what are you gonna do?
Mary: I love that they were so exclamatory about how beautiful Effie was. Tavia didn’t stop and convince herself Effie was beautiful, she knew because Effie is her sister and best friend.
While most of the novel feels very contemporary and politically relevant, the last third or so of the novel really felt like a standard YA book to me, just trying to get through the plot, and I didn’t like that. I don’t even like saying that here, because I feel like this is an important book that is saying something really cool to young women. It’s a good book, I just don’t know that the very end worked for me. Part of it, I think, is that there’s going to be a sequel. We’ve talked about this before, but anytime a book is setting up a sequel, I get kind of irritated.
Emily: Yeah, I kind of rolled my eyes inwardly when it ended in a prom. Like okay. We get it. You’re in high school. And I too hate being set up for a sequel.
Mary: Do we want to rate this? I gave it 4/5 stars on Goodreads. I really enjoyed it, but I did wish the voices were a little different!
Emily: I gave it a 3/5 stars. I also enjoyed it, but I wish all the different mythical creatures and how they fit into real-world Portland was explored a little more. I know we might get more of that in the second book, but I wish more of that had been set up in this book so that we could just build from there. I was left with a lot of questions. But I would be willing to read the second book in the series, for sure. The world and these characters intrigued me.
Mary: Next time, we’re reading All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson. This novel seems part memoir, part manifesto, and I couldn’t be more excited to read it. We’ve both heard lots of good things!