Reviews with content warning for Abandonment - Chlorine

Reviews tagging 'Abandonment'

Chlorine by Jade Song

11 reviews

letterpress's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I think I am still trying to get my mind around what I just read. So I am giving it 4 stars, I think?

At the start of this book you meet Ren Yu, a girl that born for the water. It starts with a love for mermaids and joining the swim team, it then slowly evolves into something else. This is a coming of age story that deals with tons of problems and pressures of being a teenage girl, both physically and mentally.

This book doesn’t have tons of dialogue but that could be by design Ren is so obsessed and driven she doesn’t really need anyone else. Even though she does have a best friend in Cathy who she tolerates best among everyone. As you read it is very easy to get deeper up into her all in mentality and slow entry into reality of becoming a mermaid.

Another really good novel by a debut author!

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bibrarian_'s review against another edition

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dark reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

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annuich's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.25

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aileron's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

ouijabroad's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

I really enjoyed this one which I’m thankful for because I’ve had several let downs recently.

I read this in about a day because I couldn’t put it down! The writing is beautiful and as a child who never wanted to leave the water and longed to be a mermaid so badly I connected with Ren on some level (not to the extreme she went to of course). I remember hopping around with my legs crisscrossed at the ankles in my elemntary school classroom and being enamored with the mermaids in the cartoon of Peter Pan.

The telling of a coming of age tale that didn’t fall into tropes and cis-heteronormativity was refreshing.

My only real “complaint”, and I’m using that term loosely because as I said I loved this, I don’t know if I would call this book a horror book; there’s really only one visceral scene and the rest, while unsettling (or maybe not depending on if you believe Ren’s ideas about herself) is mostly a coming of age story mixed with a fairy tale…then again, growing up a girl is pretty horrible. The descriptions of how Jim is with the young girls made me seethe and cringe as someone who has experienced this kind of behavior by many men I’ve come into contact with at a young age. It seems universal. I did find a lot of truth in Song’s writing even if Ren and I experienced very different childhoods.

Normally ambiguous endings annoy me but I was satisfied with this one. Then I keep thinking is it ambiguous though?! I think it’s up to the reader and some context clues to decide that.

Again I really loved this even though it strayed pretty far out of my chosen horror genre. Looking forward to reading more of Jade Song’s work in the future!

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catwhisperer's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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goatsinspace's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Thank you to libro.fm for the ALC! This is my honest review.

This is a horror novel, so you're going to be disturbed. So, enjoyment: 3/5 stars; writing: 5/5. Jade Song is talented.

This is such a complex and intense book. This is one of those rare authors that are able to find the horror in the mundane. This is a novel about a young competitive swimmer in high school and that's really all I can tell you without sounding like a crazy person. This discusses the harm done to those in extremely competitive sports with a little smattering of other equally important and uncomfortable topics. Important read.

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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.”

Content Warnings

faeriviera's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Uh...wow.

Lyrical prose, deeply unsettling, ultimately does precisely what it sets out to do, which is show how damaging the pressures of being teenage girls, particularly those who don't fit the molds of "normal", can be. <You will likely pray for the comeuppance of every man in her life but I'm warning you now, it will not come. >

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rdunph's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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