Sorrowland

Trigger Warnings: rape, torture, abuse, self-harm, pedophilia, child abuse, death, drowning, childbirth, blood, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, cult, brainwash, racism.

When Vern escapes the strict religious compound where she grew up, she's seven months pregnant and desperate. She flees into the woods where she gives birth to twins, Howling and Feral, and plans to raise them far from the reaches of the outside world.

But Vern can't flee from her past, metamorphosis is leaking into her world. Forced to fight the community that refuses to let her go, she discovers she can handle something that no person should ever be capable of.

To understand what's happening, and to protect her small family, Vern has to face everything, especially what lies show more beyond the outside of the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of both the compound and the violent history in America that helped produce it.

Rivers Solomon is a talented writer and I'm always excited to read their books. But just like with The Deep , it took me a minute to get into the writing style. Vern had an older voice, an old soul even, wise beyond her years... it took me a bit to get into the narrative. I struggled slightly in the beginning, trying to figure out what time this was supposed to be set in, but quickly figured out why that was the case.

Vern is a black albino woman, who is struggling to understand herself, the world around, her upbringing, and others around her. She was a hard character to like; sometimes she wasn't a good mother or a good person. But throughout the novel, you learn more about her and start to understand her pain, both mentally and physically, past and present. You begin to empathize. Solomon writes prose in such a way that you're engulfed in it and, though there may be nothing similar, you as a reader, connect with Vern.

I loved how genderless this book is... it explores gender in a way I haven't read before. The best example would be Vern's children, though others try to put labels on them, Vern says they're children and that's that. There's also a sapphic romance in the novel!

Though the list of Trigger Warnings is a bit long, Sorrowland is a novel that deals with racism, social injustice, and misogyny. Solomon does all this using horror elements as well as magical realism. I know people have it marked as Fantasy, but it's magical realism... I can see that this book won't be for everyone, it deals with a lot and the main character won't be liked by most, but I will still recommend this to anyone who has read Solomon's other works and enjoy them as well as those new to their work. Those who enjoy Octavia E. Butler would also enjoy this. show less

This was a fantastic book. I'm not sure how Rivers Solomon sustained the intensity of Vern's story and Vern's emotional journey so completely throughout the book, but they did it, and did it convincingly. This had an emotional resonance and bone-deep ache in its exploration of the loss and the abuse of Black bodies in US history (and US present), but it was also a page-turning, propulsive narrative. I hope non-genre readers will be adventurous enough to read this book (it doesn't stick with any one genre, but borrows liberally from the tools provided by horror, gothic, fantasy, sci-fi, and realistic fiction). I will certainly be recommending this to everyone this year! (Also, it provided unforgettable characters in Vern, Gogo, Howling, show more and Feral).

Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an ARC of this book, which did not influence my review. show less

Sorrowland is a truly apt title for this book by Rivers Solomon. It embraces a sorrowful upbringing of a rebellious young woman in a Black Power commune; a sorrowful series of events as this woman, Fern, escapes and faces terrors in a forest where she lives with her baby twins; and a sorrowful spotlight shed on America's history of violent, dehumanizing actions against the “other.”

But it remains a compelling, action-filled, suspenseful, even joyful story that moves quickly through a series of events, almost a series of lives, that Fern lives as she becomes her unique, sexy, strong self. It's an amazing journey, one that the reader will never anticipate at the beginning of the novel.

Many characters befriend and show compassion show more toward Fern and her children, and many others try to manipulate and control her. Through it, the reader is in Fern's mind experiencing the soul-shattering range of her emotions and her perspective on the world. It's one of those wonderful novels where the reader must say out loud, “Wow,” at once astounded at Fern and ashamed of the country she/we live in.

This book was furnished by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. show less

Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up because the author's A Major Talent

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

The Publisher Says: Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the show more future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: ↡↡↡ HEED. THE. CONTENT. WARNINGS. BELOW. ↡↡↡

There are almost no good people in this world, and Vern meets the worst of them. What makes this a deeply satisfying read is that teenaged Vern, in their unbelievable indomitable drive to thrive not just survive, manages to do exactly that. Overcoming all-too-real obstacles? Check. Guiding new lives through a terrible world, explaining how to be better? Check. Vern raising their children is the single brightest take-away I have from this unhappy story.
Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby's fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.

If I were to seek my mental filing system's catalog for closest comparables, I'd have to go with Toni Morrison's deathless [Beloved] admixed with Octavia E. Butler's more trenchant [Kindred], as written for Quentin Tarantino to film. Yes...violence and menace are imbued in every scene. No, it isn't a splatterfest. Yes, every single thing that happens evokes an emotional response. No, there are no "answers" or fancy nostrums to help us deal with the underlying hate, like the lava in a volcano, erupting for as long as it erupts.
Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.

If you've read 2017's [An Unkindness of Ghosts] or 2019's [Blood is Another Word for Hunger], you're ahead of me in this realization. If you haven't, read this book. You will not regret your introduction to the magical prose that Author Solomon uses being this story. I'm willing to bet you'll get on to their back catalog after finishing the read. If not, if this is just all too much for your sensibilities at the present, read their free online short work that's part of The Verge's "Better Worlds" project: St. Juju.

This writer is a Talent in a world that needs more of them.

CW: sexual assault, CW: violence show less

This seems like the perfect book to wrap up Black History month.

I know, it took me a while to get to this one. While I have adored Solomon since An Unkindness of Ghosts, faer writing tends to be devastating, and devastated is generally how I start the day. But the second I opened this, I was entranced and could not look away.

There are plenty of reasons to want to look away. This book digs deep into atrocities this country has heaped on Black people throughout its history, the complicity of individuals, institutions, and the state, and the problems of power. Through Cainland, it also chews on the idealized racial justice society to oppressive cult to mass death pipeline. There is also weird mushroom bullshit (affectionate), some show more anti-settler discourse, gender/sex fuckery, and a whole lot of the ways straight cis-men grind anyone other underfoot. (But there are certainly lots of women happy to participate through various betrayals along the way.)

One aspect of the book that I am still not sure how I feel about is Vern's age. The book opens with Vern giving birth to twins alone in the woods, when she is just fifteen. There is a lot of hand-waving time passing during the book in which it feels like Vern is getting much older, but the main final conflict seems to happen when she is still just nineteen. While basically her entire life has forced her to grow up too fast, every time a rare reference to her age popped up, it was shocking, in that she just does not read that young.

I really have way too many thoughts and feelings about this book to sum up here. But I thought this was absolutely incredible. show less

The story opens with teenage Vern giving birth alone in the forest. She has been living on her own in the wilderness for months after fleeing the religious compound where she grew up, despite the efforts of "the fiend" who has been in near-constant pursuit of her. Somehow Vern manages to continue to elude her pursuer and care for her twin boys for several years, trying to avoid thinking about the unsettling protuberances that have begun to emerge from her torso.

I finished this book still somewhat unsure how I felt about it. The writing style was all right. I found the premise intriguing at first, and I was relatively strongly engaged first third or so, but it sort of lost me with the hauntings and body horror. I really struggle with show more magical realism, but I selected this to fulfill the Read Harder category "a gothic novel published in the last ten years." It was, unfortunately, ultimately not for me. show less

Vern, a heavily pregnant teen, flees her Black separatist compound. But in the woods around them lurk fiends who hunt and taunt her. As she raises her twins, her own body seems to turn against her, hiding perhaps monstrous secrets of her own. Vern doesn’t know how, much less who, to trust, and she doesn’t know how to ask for the help she needs, though she finds people who extend it to her anyway. This is a worthy sequel to Solomon’s first novel, a story of rage and injustice that doesn’t feel hopeless despite how little faith it has in America (especially its white people).