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Ren Yu is a 17-year-old Chinese-American competitive swimmer who believes she is a mermaid. Here's an excerpt from the first page of the book:
Mermaids wear one-piece swimsuits sculpting severe camel toe. Mermaids have neither hair nor scalp, but latex swim caps, squeezing forehead fat out like dollops of leftover toothpaste from near-empty tubes. Mermaids swim in chlorine, thrive in locker rooms, and dive under and over lane ropes. Mermaids sprout thick and luscious body hair, until shaved off for aerodynamics. Mermaids would rather eat four bowls of pasta than a man – though a man does taste good, mermaids prefer not to waste precious stomach volume on such non-nutritious fare, for a man is not sustenance but an occasional dessert.
Mermaids are not born. We are made.
Isn't that a great opening? I bought the book based on the premise and the first couple pages, which were both very much up my alley. And then I only ended up reading up to the point of the depressing incident at the party and Cathy's subsequent letter, then skipped to the last couple chapters to see what happened.
The reason I ended up not finishing it was oddly similar to why I liked the opening so much. The rest of the book that I read is written in the same style, same tone, and same level of intensity, whether it's describing mermaids, racism, rape, or breakfast.
We mutilated our guts with bowls of raw oats mixed with applesauce, stacks of banana walnut pancakes, pots of pasta mingled with marinara and basil, shakes of protein powder blended with egg whites, casseroles of coalesced buffalo chicken dip.
Even the interspersed letters from Cathy, Ren Yu's friend and crush, are written in a very similar style and with very similar opinions – so much so that I think they're Ren Yu imagining the letters she'd like to get from Cathy. The book ended up feeling one note and suffocating.
There's a very fine line in this type of unreliable narrative - dark comedy, raw fury, obsession, and social commentary - between awesome and unbearable. For me, Chlorine was just to the wrong side of that mark. I read the gut mutilation sentence and instead of thinking "Brilliant commentary on orthorexia," I thought "Dude. It's pancakes."
This is very much a minority opinion - most reviewers loved this book - and obviously I did not read the entire thing. But in case you're really taken with the idea of a competitive swimmer mermaid, here be spoilers.
Ren Yu cuts up her legs, sews them together to create a mermaid's tail, attempts to compete like that, and is taken to a hospital. This does seem to objectively happen. If I'm interpreting the ending correctly, she throws herself out the hospital window while imagining that Cathy busts her out so she can swim out to sea as a real mermaid. If that's right, the frame story in which she's a mermaid reminiscing about her life on land is actually either a dying fantasy or a delusion in the psych ward. But at least one reviewer did think Ren Yu really did turn into a mermaid, so I could be wrong.
Currently $1.99 on Amazon.
Mermaids wear one-piece swimsuits sculpting severe camel toe. Mermaids have neither hair nor scalp, but latex swim caps, squeezing forehead fat out like dollops of leftover toothpaste from near-empty tubes. Mermaids swim in chlorine, thrive in locker rooms, and dive under and over lane ropes. Mermaids sprout thick and luscious body hair, until shaved off for aerodynamics. Mermaids would rather eat four bowls of pasta than a man – though a man does taste good, mermaids prefer not to waste precious stomach volume on such non-nutritious fare, for a man is not sustenance but an occasional dessert.
Mermaids are not born. We are made.
Isn't that a great opening? I bought the book based on the premise and the first couple pages, which were both very much up my alley. And then I only ended up reading up to the point of the depressing incident at the party and Cathy's subsequent letter, then skipped to the last couple chapters to see what happened.
The reason I ended up not finishing it was oddly similar to why I liked the opening so much. The rest of the book that I read is written in the same style, same tone, and same level of intensity, whether it's describing mermaids, racism, rape, or breakfast.
We mutilated our guts with bowls of raw oats mixed with applesauce, stacks of banana walnut pancakes, pots of pasta mingled with marinara and basil, shakes of protein powder blended with egg whites, casseroles of coalesced buffalo chicken dip.
Even the interspersed letters from Cathy, Ren Yu's friend and crush, are written in a very similar style and with very similar opinions – so much so that I think they're Ren Yu imagining the letters she'd like to get from Cathy. The book ended up feeling one note and suffocating.
There's a very fine line in this type of unreliable narrative - dark comedy, raw fury, obsession, and social commentary - between awesome and unbearable. For me, Chlorine was just to the wrong side of that mark. I read the gut mutilation sentence and instead of thinking "Brilliant commentary on orthorexia," I thought "Dude. It's pancakes."
This is very much a minority opinion - most reviewers loved this book - and obviously I did not read the entire thing. But in case you're really taken with the idea of a competitive swimmer mermaid, here be spoilers.
Ren Yu cuts up her legs, sews them together to create a mermaid's tail, attempts to compete like that, and is taken to a hospital. This does seem to objectively happen. If I'm interpreting the ending correctly, she throws herself out the hospital window while imagining that Cathy busts her out so she can swim out to sea as a real mermaid. If that's right, the frame story in which she's a mermaid reminiscing about her life on land is actually either a dying fantasy or a delusion in the psych ward. But at least one reviewer did think Ren Yu really did turn into a mermaid, so I could be wrong.
Currently $1.99 on Amazon.
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And I'm wondering about what propelled the author to write this--is it fury over how athletes are treated or what? (I realize I can answer this question for myself with some investigation. I'm just thinking out loud...)
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Song was a competitive swimmer, which was part of why I was so interested in reading the book. I'd guess factors were an interest in mermaids and fury over the treatment of young athletes, racism, sexism, and rape culture.
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And nodding wrt what you say about Song.
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The author is nonbinary, for what it's worth.
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It made me think of a deliberately reversed Little Mermaid, especially more body-horror variants like The Lure (2015).
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I can't vouch that it is any good at all, because I haven't read it since high school and my memory is that its tone is farcical, but L. Sprague de Camp's "Nothing in the Rules" (1939) is a story whose entire conceit is a mermaid as a contestant in a women's swim meet.
[edit] Oh, yeah, I don't think it's good. But it does exist.
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