Reviews tagging 'Grief'

Chlorine by Jade Song

1 review

just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

 
Mostly just thanks to Libro.fm for the ALC that put this on my radar in the first place. Magical humanistic creatures are a soft spot of mine in fantasy literature; vampires being the primary obviously, but sometimes I am in the mood for a more water-based situation. 
 
Ren Yu is a swimmer, a fact about her that dictates her life more than any other aspect of her personality, family, interests, etc. Her every moment revolves around swimming: her coach, her team, her times, her competition, her goals for a scholarship and how being the best at swimming will bring her the success in life she and her parents crave for her. But throughout the years of her adolescence, this daily intensity in reality mixes with the magical stories of mermaids that she was raised on and loves, and when her mental stability takes a dive (pun sort of intended), she mixes those aspects in a painful and bloody way to create, for herself, the life of freedom in the water that is all she's ever wanted. 
 
Having read both The Pisces and The Vegetarian, which were comp titles in the blurb about this book, I maybe should have suspected that this would be as...weird...as it was.But for some reason, it still took me by surprise. It started from the very beginning, with a feeling, masterfully imparted by the writing itself, of an off-ness that one can't quite put one's finger on. And it continues, without letting up, in a super weird and uncomfortable head-on addressing of coming-of-age, exploring sexuality, the focus on teen years, the intensity of athletics (and playing up the creepy factor of coaches of young high-talent athletes), and more. Specifically, there is an unflinching addressing of maturing for anyone with a uterus - from periods to tampons to sex to pregnancy scares to IUD insertion - in a way that might come off as vulgar, but only within the accepted, but arbitrary, societal standards with which simple bodily functions and fluids that anyone [who menstruates] experiences. As a person working in the field of adolescent health and puberty/sex ed, I loved that aspect. Yes, those topics are visceral, particularly in the body-horror-style way that they are described here. *But* it's also accurate, and in many ways universal, so this private (real) experience, versus the sanitized public awareness we usually get, really hit home for me, as a reader. 
 
Past that, the way Song pinpoints and puts into words the hazards of growing up in the “normal” sense - unwanted sexual contact that isn’t violent but is traumatic in that one doesn't want it but also doesn’t say no to it, the high standards of familial expectation, the coach that has a creepily watchful eye and toes a line of making one uncomfortable but never crosses into something fully acusable, the experimentation with substances that never hits a point of overdose or addiction - are the star of this novel. These "everyday traumas" are usually written off with a "it happens to everyone" or a "it's not that bad" or a "you'll move past and forget it" and those dismissals can be almost as much of a trauma as the experience itself. Recognizing that here, and how that all can have devastating effects on a teen's mental health, is spectacular. There is, perhaps, a satire here, in the way that Song takes the story and Ren's mermaid transformation plotline. And yet, the message in that metaphor, the extreme lengths to which a person might go (in this case, turning to the mythical) to find sources of power and purpose in a world that provides none, or at least not proper support for one's journey there, is strong and clear and important.   
 
There is a literal and figurative crampy, bloody, creepy vibe to this sapphic, magical realism coming of age story. This is an intense and somewhat disturbing parable for the fight to make yourself who you truly are, and how far you’d go to make that happen. Super unnerving. And while it's definitely the kind of weird I don’t necessarily enjoy as a reader, I can still recognize what the author did (and where I really recognized parts of myself in the story), and appreciate it for what it is. 
 
“I never said yes, but I never said no, and the indefinite limbo of maybe is where regret and doubt and confusion reside as neighbors, forever reduced to the monotony of a clouded memory, the mind traveling in never-ending cul-de-sac circles.” 
 
“Because human lives are situational. Humans think they have free will, free agency, but really, they follow the push and pull of whatever happens.” 
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