A Song Below Water Review

If you haven’t read A Song Below Water yet, borrow your dad’s convertible, hail a passing gargoyle, or swim to your nearest bookstore, and get it ASAP.

My friends and I started a book club at the beginning of quarantine, which has been lovely, but I’ll be honest. Until we hit Challenger Deep last month, none of the books were really 𝓂𝓎 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔. Enter A Song Below Water. YA fantasy? Um, yes. Black girl leads? Hello! I was so jazzed before we even started, and once we did…

In Tavia and Effie’s world, sprites are common pests, elokos are popular kids and presidents, and being a siren (now synonymous with being a black girl) is punishable by death. After a “suspected” siren’s killer is acquitted at trial, Tavia’s need to hide her true nature becomes more critical and more difficult. Which makes her need to contact her siren grandmother and discover her powers a priority.

Meanwhile, Tavia’s adopted sister, Effie, is struggling to outrun a childhood tragedy that turned four of her friends to stone. What should be a happy junior year, growing closer to the memory of her mom at the renaissance fair where she plays a mermaid, is thrown into chaos when Effie’s hair starts moving on its own, and her skin starts peeling off.

Tavia doesn’t know if she can ever be herself; Effie doesn’t even know who she is. But this tale of black sisterhood is every bit as magical as the world it creates.

Let’s talk about world-building. This book is the equivalent of a launch coaster, in that you open it, and it’s already speeding along at 200. Bethany C. Morrow crafts such a rich, lived-in world, balancing the everyday concerns of high school and evil exes; the familiar urgency of discrimination, police brutality, and protesting; your love for that one vlogger you follow; and, oh yeah, a city chock-full of mythological creatures in a way that seems true to both the characters and how a world like this might actually feel.

I loved Effie. It’s so difficult to write an anxious character, and Morrow pulls it off flawlessly, including nods to mental illness that I recognize from my life that also foreshadow Effie’s mythological reality.

The book is also a love letter to black hair; each and every description—in water, out of water, waving mysteriously, up for prom (why obnoxious white girls shouldn’t go touching it…)—is gorgeous in a way I don’t see often in YA.

The twists (if you’ll pardon the pun) and turns are great and kept me guessing until the very end, though I’m ashamed of myself for not realizing what Effie was until way too late.

Also, I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without mentioning Gargy, the personification (gargoyle-ification?) of a heart eyes emoji.

I give the third Book In My Basket 4/5 stars. I’m so excited to see more from Morrow (fingers crossed for a sequel???)!