Scan barcode
A review by lottiezeb
The Surface Breaks by Louise O'Neill
To be perfectly honest this book did not work for me at all. I’ve wrestled with my inner demons and locked Unnecessarily Mean Goodreads Review Charlotte deep, deep underground, but there are a lot of things that I really disliked here. If this review ever veers away from being reasonably critical and just becomes nasty, please let me know!
So What's It About?
Deep beneath the sea, off the cold Irish coast, Gaia is a young mermaid who dreams of freedom from her controlling father. On her first swim to the surface, she is drawn towards a human boy. She longs to join his carefree world, but how much will she have to sacrifice? What will it take for the little mermaid to find her voice? Hans Christian Andersen's original fairy tale is reimagined through a searing feminist lens, with the stunning, scalpel-sharp writing and world building that has won Louise her legions of devoted fans. A book with the darkest of undercurrents, full of rage and rallying cries: storytelling at its most spellbinding.
What I Thought
It’s easy to take shots at classic fairy tales for their Lack of Girl Power and Poor Female Role Models, and The Little Mermaid is no exception - after all, it’s the one where she literally silences herself and changes her body for a man!!! The Surface Breaks is clearly written with the intent of reworking the original tale to bear a feminist message. I respect that initiative, but I have problems with almost every part of how O’Neill went about doing this.
One of my biggest issues here is Gaia herself as a narrator. She begins the story as an incredibly cowed, self-hating girl who is powerless and indoctrinated by her culture’s sexism. That’s a pretty interesting place to start a character, in my opinion, but the problem is that O’Neill still uses her as the mouthpiece for dozens of astute observations about the injustice of sexism while she's had no character development. The mini-feminist monologues make absolutely no sense when she declares them and turns back around and silently trails her prince around his mansion, still desperate to win his love. The other problem is that she makes some of these observations specifically about the human world as opposed to the mermaid land, and there is no way that the character herself could know anything about lecherous Catholic priests or corporate harassment culture.
Some of these declarations feel rather misguided in my opinion, such as the time that a male character says women aren’t funny and Gaia reflects to herself that, well, maybe women would be funny if they weren’t taught that they had to spend all their time laughing at men’s jokes. This is such a bizarre take to me, because who on earth makes a feminist rebuttal to the Women Aren’t Funny schtick by agreeing that women are not, in fact, funny? The misguided messages carry over to the book’s handling of its themes of sexual violence and abuse; at one point the empowered, liberated Witch Queen - who acts as the main voice of morality and wisdom in the book - looks at Gaia with contempt and rhetorically asks her if she thinks she’s had it rough compared to the traumatized mermaids that the Witch Queen takes care of, concluding that Gaia doesn’t know anything about suffering. I am willing to doubt that a book should be marketed as a #MeToo read for teens when it legitimately “ranks” characters’ trauma and tells a girl who has been dealing with male violence her whole life to suck it up and be grateful that it wasn’t worse, especially after she has experienced an attempted rape mere pages before the conversation in question.
Another utterly bizarre moment is when a woman gets called crazy and Gaia says the following:
“She’s crazy, we used to say about maids in the kingdom who pursued certain mer-men relentlessly, crying and asking too many questions about where their man was and who he was with and if he had talked to any other maid that day. I’m beginning to wonder if, when we call a woman crazy, we should take a look at the man by her side and guess at what he has done to drive her to insanity.”
What I THINK this is trying to say is that sometimes abusive, toxic men paint their victims as the crazy ones and there is a long history of pathologizing women’s suffering when it actually stems from outside sources so we should take a closer look at relationships before we simply accept that a woman is a hysterical bitch etc etc. But that’s not what this passage is actually saying, because the women described in the passage are the ones who are jealous and possessive and refuse to respect boundaries, right? So the inadvertent message here, to me, is that when a woman is actually jealous and possessive and refuses to respect boundaries, we should simply look at her male partner and figure out what he did to “drive her to it.” I sincerely hope that this is just writing that could have used more editing and not the intended message here.
I actually really like the fundamental premise that a princess who grows up in a horribly sexist world decides that instalove with a handsome boy will save her from her troubles, but then she ultimately realizes her own power and saves herself. She realizes that the prince who sweeps you off your feet (tail?) is just a dream and no man is worth mutilating and silencing yourself for. That’s more or less what happens here, but, as I mentioned, a huge problem is that all of her learning and character development happens at the very end, in the final conversation with the Sea Witch, and she simply spends the rest of her time on land as Oliver’s devoted second shadow. It could have been so much more effective, especially if she had interacted with interesting women on the surface. As it is, there is just Oliver’s mother - a girlboss facing the glass ceiling who is injudiciously hated by her son but hates Gaia just as much as Oliver hates her - and Gaia’s devoted servant who brews her gallons of homemade pain medicine and tends to her disintegrating feet every day.
And at the end of the day, Gaia's final realization about Oliver isn’t actually that she shouldn’t have tortured herself for his sake and pinned all of her hopes on a man she didn’t know - it’s that she was wrong in thinking men just cared about good looks - they actually like a girl who is smart and funny and has interesting opinions. Why is that the limit of how far the envelope is pushed for this part of the story - why is The Lesson about Oliver still about how to win a man?
Of course, the story goes further in the last bit when she That’s definitely a much stronger ending, but I do question the efficacy of her transformation into a powerful new form being predicated on . I don’t know - I think different readers will feel differently about that bit.
The book does its best to cover so many topics - eugenics, colonialism, gay rights, body image, corporate sexism, beauty standards, rape culture, abuse - but it ends up reducing each one to a surface level line or two in one of Gaia’s monologues, and none of it is handled with a great amount of nuance or depth. There were a few moments that felt so horribly on the nose to me, like when Gaia dismisses Zale’s sexist comment as “just mer-man talk - stop being so sensitive” or talks about the underwater kingdom being “made great again” by her father’s rule.
A few final notes - we never really explore the fact that Gaia chooses to kill Oliver’s girlfriend in order to save his life, and the fact that she is able to do so doesn’t even make sense. The Salkas specifically prey on human men for their misandrist revenge, so why would they accept a teenage girl in his place? Occasionally it is almost like the author forgets what setting she is writing in, both underwater on the surface. There are a few times that she describes the environment in the mermaid kingdom as “the air” and at one point Gaia inexplicably refers to a conch shell by its Latin name. I can’t fathom why Oliver and his family don’t attempt to teach Gaia sign language or how to read and write once they realize she is mute and illiterate. And on the point of that muteness…I ended up consulting with Goodreads because the day after Ceto cuts out Gaia’s tongue, she is able to happily eat a bowl of porridge. My friends’ estimates of the damage done by a cut-out tongue varied widely, but one and all agreed that you definitely wouldn’t be able to eat the next day. I KNOW that Ceto doesn’t use witch magic to heal her, either, because when the human doctor inspects her, everyone is horrified by the raw wound in her mouth!!!!! Finally, the writing is neutral overall but the mermaid characters switch between saying “okay” to each other and using pseudo-fantasy language. The strangest bit of writing to me is when Gaia imagines herself doing something difficult and, referring to herself, says “it is heavy, is it not, little one?”
I’ve now been talking about feminist mermaids for a long time. Too long, perhaps? In any case, this one really did not work for me at all. For books that I personally prefer in the YA Feminist Fairy Tale Genre, I would recommend [b:Stepsister|41473840|Stepsister|Jennifer Donnelly|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537558055l/41473840._SY75_.jpg|57964830] and [b:Damsel|36260155|Damsel|Elana K. Arnold|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518818837l/36260155._SY75_.jpg|57912874].
So What's It About?
Deep beneath the sea, off the cold Irish coast, Gaia is a young mermaid who dreams of freedom from her controlling father. On her first swim to the surface, she is drawn towards a human boy. She longs to join his carefree world, but how much will she have to sacrifice? What will it take for the little mermaid to find her voice? Hans Christian Andersen's original fairy tale is reimagined through a searing feminist lens, with the stunning, scalpel-sharp writing and world building that has won Louise her legions of devoted fans. A book with the darkest of undercurrents, full of rage and rallying cries: storytelling at its most spellbinding.
What I Thought
It’s easy to take shots at classic fairy tales for their Lack of Girl Power and Poor Female Role Models, and The Little Mermaid is no exception - after all, it’s the one where she literally silences herself and changes her body for a man!!! The Surface Breaks is clearly written with the intent of reworking the original tale to bear a feminist message. I respect that initiative, but I have problems with almost every part of how O’Neill went about doing this.
One of my biggest issues here is Gaia herself as a narrator. She begins the story as an incredibly cowed, self-hating girl who is powerless and indoctrinated by her culture’s sexism. That’s a pretty interesting place to start a character, in my opinion, but the problem is that O’Neill still uses her as the mouthpiece for dozens of astute observations about the injustice of sexism while she's had no character development. The mini-feminist monologues make absolutely no sense when she declares them and turns back around and silently trails her prince around his mansion, still desperate to win his love. The other problem is that she makes some of these observations specifically about the human world as opposed to the mermaid land, and there is no way that the character herself could know anything about lecherous Catholic priests or corporate harassment culture.
Some of these declarations feel rather misguided in my opinion, such as the time that a male character says women aren’t funny and Gaia reflects to herself that, well, maybe women would be funny if they weren’t taught that they had to spend all their time laughing at men’s jokes. This is such a bizarre take to me, because who on earth makes a feminist rebuttal to the Women Aren’t Funny schtick by agreeing that women are not, in fact, funny? The misguided messages carry over to the book’s handling of its themes of sexual violence and abuse; at one point the empowered, liberated Witch Queen - who acts as the main voice of morality and wisdom in the book - looks at Gaia with contempt and rhetorically asks her if she thinks she’s had it rough compared to the traumatized mermaids that the Witch Queen takes care of, concluding that Gaia doesn’t know anything about suffering. I am willing to doubt that a book should be marketed as a #MeToo read for teens when it legitimately “ranks” characters’ trauma and tells a girl who has been dealing with male violence her whole life to suck it up and be grateful that it wasn’t worse, especially after she has experienced an attempted rape mere pages before the conversation in question.
Another utterly bizarre moment is when a woman gets called crazy and Gaia says the following:
“She’s crazy, we used to say about maids in the kingdom who pursued certain mer-men relentlessly, crying and asking too many questions about where their man was and who he was with and if he had talked to any other maid that day. I’m beginning to wonder if, when we call a woman crazy, we should take a look at the man by her side and guess at what he has done to drive her to insanity.”
What I THINK this is trying to say is that sometimes abusive, toxic men paint their victims as the crazy ones and there is a long history of pathologizing women’s suffering when it actually stems from outside sources so we should take a closer look at relationships before we simply accept that a woman is a hysterical bitch etc etc. But that’s not what this passage is actually saying, because the women described in the passage are the ones who are jealous and possessive and refuse to respect boundaries, right? So the inadvertent message here, to me, is that when a woman is actually jealous and possessive and refuses to respect boundaries, we should simply look at her male partner and figure out what he did to “drive her to it.” I sincerely hope that this is just writing that could have used more editing and not the intended message here.
I actually really like the fundamental premise that a princess who grows up in a horribly sexist world decides that instalove with a handsome boy will save her from her troubles, but then she ultimately realizes her own power and saves herself. She realizes that the prince who sweeps you off your feet (tail?) is just a dream and no man is worth mutilating and silencing yourself for. That’s more or less what happens here, but, as I mentioned, a huge problem is that all of her learning and character development happens at the very end, in the final conversation with the Sea Witch, and she simply spends the rest of her time on land as Oliver’s devoted second shadow. It could have been so much more effective, especially if she had interacted with interesting women on the surface. As it is, there is just Oliver’s mother - a girlboss facing the glass ceiling who is injudiciously hated by her son but hates Gaia just as much as Oliver hates her - and Gaia’s devoted servant who brews her gallons of homemade pain medicine and tends to her disintegrating feet every day.
And at the end of the day, Gaia's final realization about Oliver isn’t actually that she shouldn’t have tortured herself for his sake and pinned all of her hopes on a man she didn’t know - it’s that she was wrong in thinking men just cared about good looks - they actually like a girl who is smart and funny and has interesting opinions. Why is that the limit of how far the envelope is pushed for this part of the story - why is The Lesson about Oliver still about how to win a man?
Of course, the story goes further in the last bit when she
Spoiler
kills her father and tells her sisters to reclaim their power. She dedicates herself to the Sea Witch and her Salkas, determined to destroy the merman patriarchy.Spoiler
killing herselfThe book does its best to cover so many topics - eugenics, colonialism, gay rights, body image, corporate sexism, beauty standards, rape culture, abuse - but it ends up reducing each one to a surface level line or two in one of Gaia’s monologues, and none of it is handled with a great amount of nuance or depth. There were a few moments that felt so horribly on the nose to me, like when Gaia dismisses Zale’s sexist comment as “just mer-man talk - stop being so sensitive” or talks about the underwater kingdom being “made great again” by her father’s rule.
A few final notes - we never really explore the fact that Gaia chooses to kill Oliver’s girlfriend in order to save his life, and the fact that she is able to do so doesn’t even make sense. The Salkas specifically prey on human men for their misandrist revenge, so why would they accept a teenage girl in his place? Occasionally it is almost like the author forgets what setting she is writing in, both underwater on the surface. There are a few times that she describes the environment in the mermaid kingdom as “the air” and at one point Gaia inexplicably refers to a conch shell by its Latin name. I can’t fathom why Oliver and his family don’t attempt to teach Gaia sign language or how to read and write once they realize she is mute and illiterate. And on the point of that muteness…I ended up consulting with Goodreads because the day after Ceto cuts out Gaia’s tongue, she is able to happily eat a bowl of porridge. My friends’ estimates of the damage done by a cut-out tongue varied widely, but one and all agreed that you definitely wouldn’t be able to eat the next day. I KNOW that Ceto doesn’t use witch magic to heal her, either, because when the human doctor inspects her, everyone is horrified by the raw wound in her mouth!!!!! Finally, the writing is neutral overall but the mermaid characters switch between saying “okay” to each other and using pseudo-fantasy language. The strangest bit of writing to me is when Gaia imagines herself doing something difficult and, referring to herself, says “it is heavy, is it not, little one?”
I’ve now been talking about feminist mermaids for a long time. Too long, perhaps? In any case, this one really did not work for me at all. For books that I personally prefer in the YA Feminist Fairy Tale Genre, I would recommend [b:Stepsister|41473840|Stepsister|Jennifer Donnelly|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537558055l/41473840._SY75_.jpg|57964830] and [b:Damsel|36260155|Damsel|Elana K. Arnold|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1518818837l/36260155._SY75_.jpg|57912874].