Reviews tagging 'Self harm'

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

50 reviews

bucketsjen's review against another edition

dark emotional inspiring sad medium-paced

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

4.5

The children of pregnant African women thrown overboard by slavers have adapted to the water and built their own society. They appoint one person every generation to be the Historian that holds all of their memories - but the current historian is struggling as the only person holding the awareness of pain and history. She returns the memories and flees, leaving her people to grapple with their history alone as she tries to find herself... but of course, their unprocessed pain effects everything.  

Has themes of cultural, generational, and personal trauma, the pain of being the only one who Knows and Understands, and processing/healing to move forward.  It's REALLY well done. While the subject matter is heavy, it's managed deftly and the book is surprisingly healing to read.

I really recommend the audiobook for this one. Daveed Diggs does an incredible job, and the work's musical history really lends it to auditory retelling.  There's an Afterward by Diggs which was an awesome addition to the story (he's funny and insightful).

 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Slavery and Grief

Moderate: Child death, Violence, Self harm, Animal death, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, and Death

Animal death, Attempted suicide, Grief, Hallucinations, Slavery (past), Self-harm, Trauma (personal, generational, cultural), violence, references to familial death.

ramreadsagain's review

challenging dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

I really enjoyed this book, it has a fantastic concept and has a lot to say about the dangers of forgetting your past, while also acknowledging the burdens of knowledge and generational trauma. 

My main critique is that I feel it's the wrong length. It should have either been shorter—and just focuson the central plotline—or a bit longer. If it was longer, we could have had more development of the events that happen during a different time in this book and perhaps some more character interactions. My gut feeling though is that it should have been shorter and really pack a quick punch. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Violence and Slavery

Moderate: Suicide attempt, Self harm, and Pregnancy

jays_bookshelf's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

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

5.0

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Content Warnings

Minor: Self harm

pacifickat's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad fast-paced

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

4.25

This was a wonderfully original fantasy novella with excellent world building, a unique culture, and themes of collective memory and belonging in tension with the main character's desire for self-determination and autonomy. It is also set against the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the cruel deaths of so many abducted Africans at sea. The Wajinru, children of African pregnant mothers thrown overboard by cruel captors and transformed into merpeople, have a history marked by tremendous grief. What I liked best about the storytelling was the lyrical style employed when describing the Wajinru in the first half of the story, and again toward the end. As a chorus, their voice is stunningly rendered.

However, there was a section toward the middle where

Yetu, the main character and ‘memory keeper’ for her people, is separated from the rest of her culture. This was less interesting to me in terms of style, but necessary for the plot of the story. Yetu longs for self-determination, individual freedom, and to be an ‘I’ in a culture of ‘we’. It is her voice that annoyed me a bit, the inclusion of details about her romantic inclinations and sexual preferences as well as her personal curiosity regarding biological distinctions between humans and merpeople. I found the unique history and anthropology of the Wajinru far more captivating than the nitty gritty of their biology. Yet Yetu’s individuality is part of the point of the story, that she doesn’t want to be swallowed up and erased in a collective oneness with her people. And what is more individual than that which a person chooses to love, and how they choose to express their affection?

 

Ultimately this is a story about finding balance, between a traumatic past and a hopeful future, between individual and communal identity, between colonizing forces and indigenous cultures, and between the land and sea itself. It is also about remembering.

"Remember. […] That was all remembering was, prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting is not the same as healing.” - Yetu

"One can only go so long without asking, ‘Who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after?’ Without answers there is only a hole, a whole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.” - Amamba

Yetu bears all of her people’s generational trauma, that is her role as ‘memory keeper’ in a society where long-term memory has largely been erased to give her people the freedom to thrive in the present unhindered by a painful past. She is their matriarch, but she is ill-suited for the role.

Out of an instinct for self-preservation, being unable to hold all of her peoples’ pain alone, she ultimately is the one to bring the wisdom of balance to the Wajinru.

 

"She couldn’t determine which was worse, the pain of the ancestors or the pain of the living. Both fed off her.”

"She learned how to make an inch for herself.”

"She touched each one of them, figuring out how each Wajinru was outside of the oneness the remembrance brought. That mattered. Who each of them was mattered as much as who all of them were together.”

"They could bear it all together.”

It is also a story about the function of memory in culture-making and identity. 

One poignant detail is that Yetu and her romantic human interest, Oori, turn out to have come from the same distant ancestors. When Oori’s homeland is swallowed up by the sea, their history washed away, both characters lost something deep and sacred. However, they gained something as well, in the relationship they chose to forge in the present together.

 

In the afterward, The Deep is described as “a game of cumulative telephone.” The concept began as a song and was adapted over time by different musical groups until this novelization was produced.

“Each new telling of The Deep has been productive rather than destructive, and each new iteration has been carried out with admiration for the previous, […] happily taking on adaptations of each new interpreter into the future.”

This is a wonderful description of culture-making, the turning of ‘I’ into ‘we’, of carrying our stories, traumas, and longings together, erasing loneliness in the context of a communal tribe. It is forming collective memory, adapting a shared history into a cohesive perspective, a meaningful and unifying mythology.

"The living put their own mark on the dead.”

 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Blood, Colonisation, Death, Grief, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, War, Slavery, Toxic relationship, Murder, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Pregnancy, Trafficking, Violence, Self harm, and Sexual content

Moderate: Fire/Fire injury, Ableism, and Animal death

drowning, shark attacks, birth, biting, neurodivergence, generational trauma, collective trauma

khakipantsofsex's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes

3.5

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Murder, Suicide attempt, Self harm, and Slavery

jinmichae's review against another edition

slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Listening to how this book came together helps it make more sense. Unfortunately, that explanation came at the end of the audiobook, so I didn't know what to expect coming into it.

I enjoyed the concept most of all, and the vignette of how they came together as a people. Unfortunately, I just didn't like the main character very much. She has reasons for being the way she is, but something about the way she was characterized made her not as sympathetic as she needed to be to explain her actions.

I also feel the overarching plot gets lost in vignettes which are more worldbuilding than progressing the narrative. I wish it was more focused on that main plot: I think it would be a better read as a short story instead of a novella. It also has a "woe is me" component that gets tiring.

I did appreciate that the main character is implied to have autism/gets overstimulated easily in a way that prevents her from doing her very important job. The depths of this discomfort isn't acknowledged by those around her though, which seems odd to me: she has family and friends who love her, and despite the plot important lack of long term memory, they *do* remember her sensitivities. I think that detail would have to be changed to make the way they treat her, and the way she reacts, make more sense.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Pregnancy, Self harm, Racism, Abandonment, and Slavery

Moderate: Chronic illness, Injury/Injury detail, Animal death, Blood, Panic attacks/disorders, Suicide attempt, and Suicidal thoughts

forgottenwitch's review against another edition

dark emotional hopeful inspiring fast-paced

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

4.0

Super short but has a lot to take in. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Self harm and Death

Moderate: Slavery

foxwish's review

dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-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

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Abandonment

Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Self harm, Suicide attempt, and Ableism

alicelalicon's review

emotional sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Slavery, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, Animal death, Self harm, Pregnancy, Racism, Blood, and Death

seratsexyrat's review against another edition

adventurous emotional fast-paced

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

5.0

I will never fully understand the pain of chattel slavery that was experienced by Black people, but I share the sentiment and the feeling of intergenerational pain and trauma as a diaspora person. Solomon managed to tap into that raw feeling of not wanting to know and needing to know that particular trauma because like it or not, that trauma to a point defines who we are. Yetu's pain and existence as a person is so real on the pages, this book haunted me for days after finishing it.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Slavery

Minor: Self harm