June 2nd 2020 | Tor Teen
Source: Library
Tavia is already at odds with the world, forced to keep her siren identity under wraps in a society that wants to keep her kind under lock and key. Never mind she's also stuck in Portland, Oregon, a city with only a handful of black folk and even fewer of those with magical powers. At least she has her bestie Effie by her side as they tackle high school drama, family secrets, and unrequited crushes.**I’m going to remove my star rating altogether for this book. Ultimately, this book and I didn’t work and I fully understand that it wasn’t written for me.**
But everything changes in the aftermath of a siren murder trial that rocks the nation; the girls’ favorite Internet fashion icon reveals she's also a siren, and the news rips through their community. Tensions escalate when Effie starts being haunted by demons from her past, and Tavia accidentally lets out her magical voice during a police stop. No secret seems safe anymore—soon Portland won’t be either.
What I liked:
—An honest look at misogynoir, police brutality, and how Black women move about this world that doesn’t often help them. The sirens and their lives as a symbol for Black women and their struggles was excellent and really well done.
—The sisterhood between Effie and Tavia: I loved, loved this aspect of the story. I’m so glad that both girls had each other to lean on when things got hard. I also really loved that Effie and Tavia weren’t related by biology but their sisterhood was still exceptionally strong. That’s so important in any book.
What I had issues with:
—The pacing was exceptionally slow. It’s a short book and I expected to be done with this in a few hours. Instead, I was bored for a lot of it.
—The world building is inconsistent and felt incomplete. Elokos, for one, barely had any explication. I also thought the blending of the real world and the world in which sirens, elokos, and other exist was inconsistent. I was left with too many questions for such a short book.
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