My book club picked The Sirens by Emilia Hart to wrap up a quarter of family dramas and—just ugh.

And here’s the thing: I don’t want to be snarky about it!! A thousand years ago when I was in college and writing movie reviews for the university paper, it was in vogue to be a snarky, mean writer. It was The Gawker and Jezebel age. It’s what was done. But I don’t want to be that kind of reviewer anymore!! I’m grown and kinder now. But I really didn’t like this book.

Ok, so now that we’ve gotten that out of the way. Here’s a list of some of my issues with The Siren and, uh, spoilers abound:

• It was boring!! There are mermaids in this book and it was still boring! The problem I often have with books that switch between perspectives of a present-day character and a past character is I always inevitably find one of their stories to be more interesting and am always waiting to go back to that perspective. Lucy’s present-day research of things the reader already knew was slow-going and uninteresting. Though her POV starts off with some intrigue, what with her sleepwalk-strangling a guy who did something awful to her, that’s the only interesting thing that happens in her POV in the entire book. And! Even though I found Mary’s chapters more interesting, they were so repetitive. Half of them could have been cut, I feel like (tbh same with Lucy’s).
• The magic/lore was under-explained and made no sense. Why did Lucy and Jess dream of Mary’s experience? Are we supposed to believe it was genetic memory? If so, that doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny because they had the exact same dreams and that’s not how genetic memory works. And why did Lucy faint and have the dreams? That’s not how fainting works, for one, and for two are we supposed to believe it’s because of increasing urgency? Why??? Mary never had someone else’s dreams. It didn’t make any sense.
  
  ALSO. On that note, how was Mary still alive over a century later to fuck Jess’ dad? (Not to mention why she’d even want to given her experience with human men.) How long do mermaids live in this lore? What happened to Eliza? How did they know all the crimes of the men we’re led to believe they killed? How does any of this make any sense?

• Why did Mary give up her baby? There’s literally no reason for her to have done so.
• Why was the creepy teacher a part of this book at all? It felt like he existed solely as a plot device for Jess to murder someone and what? Claim her fish birthright, I guess? It doesn’t make any sense at all that she would have reconnected with him in adulthood.
• What do you mean the epilogue is just the story of Jess’ dad having an affair with a fish when his wife just had a miscarriage??? And then he takes Mary’s baby? And then he raises her inland away from water and lets her grow up thinking she has a terrible skin condition when he damn well knows what’s up? And then he DOES IT AGAIN with Lucy? And then the book treats him like a “good guy” in the end?
• What happens after Jess and Lucy learn they’re fish? Do they ever find Mary and Eliza? Are there other mermaids? How do they split their time between sea and land? Everything interesting in this book happens at the very end (even though the reader already knows it all way sooner) and we don’t get any of the good stuff.
• What happens to Bridie, Sarah, and Annie? Why was it important that Mary and Eliza chose to save them? I feel like there was a missed opportunity here where they could have carried down stories of Mary and Eliza throughout the years and that could have been something unearthed in Lucy’s research, but that’s not what happened so ugh.

That’s probably enough, even though I have more I could say (like when Jess says she named her “Lucy” so she’d have “the sea in her name” as if that’s not the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard in my goddamned life). It just wasn’t a very good book and was probably one of my more disappointing reads this year. If you’re looking for historical fiction, there are better options out there. Same for magical realism/fantasy. Sigh.

I hope your weekend reading material was more satisfying than mine. 🤷🏻‍♀️