Thursday, April 22, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on May 4, 2021 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Sorrowland is the second novel by Rivers Solomon, the author of 2017's An Unkindness of Ghosts (Reviewed Here).  Solomon's work (they also wrote the 2019 novella, The Deep as well as parts of the first season of Serial Box's "The Vela") in the past has always been a tremendously powerful use of the genre to hit strong themes of the historical racist atrocities this country and world has perpetuated, whether that be through the translation of an antebellum plantation onto a generation ship (An Unkindness of Ghosts), dealing with the memories and survivors of Africans thrown overboard from slave ships (The Deep) or horrific treatment of refugees of a people whose world was destroyed by outsiders' greed (The Vela).  One thing their work has never been - and is unlikely to ever be - is easy to read, and so I went into Sorrowland expecting another whopper of a science fiction story.  

And Sorrowland definitely is another whopper, although this is a scifi/fantasy novel more closer in timeline to our own.  Once again Solomon centers the story around a protagonist struggling with identity in a cruel cruel world enacting horrors similar to our own - both by others (via experimenting on black bodies) and by a group themselves.  Its protagonist, Vern, is at first a teenager who doesn't fit in to her community - not into its ideas of gender, of sexuality, of the need to be religiously controlled, and who flees that community while pregnant (at age 15) with two children, only to discover more about herself, and about the world, than she could ever have imagined - or that anyone could seemingly have imagined.  Her story is the story of a girl persevering in the face of tremendous odds and atrocities, finding herself, and fighting back while never forgetting what has been done to her, and it's a really strong story. 

Trigger Warning:  Child Abuse, Spiritual Abuse, Child Pregnancy (and implied offpage rape as backstory), Unwilling Scientific Experimentation On African Americans.    -----------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
15 year old Vern ran into the forest surrounding the camp of the Blessed Acres of Cain, determined to ensure that her child grew up free from the camp's restrictions and dogma, free from the control of her mother and her husband the camp's leader, Reverend Sherman.  Vern had never fit in with them - as an Albino in a camp dedicated to black power, a child who never fit as either boy or girl and who had a secret interest in other girls, and as a wild child who knew the Reverend's controlling dictates made no sense in their constraints.  And when she gives birth to two sons, she names them Feral and Howling, knowing that these two inhuman names would be the last thing the Cainties would want.  And then, as she tries to care for her two sons in the forest, all the while hiding from a fiend of a hunter who seems always to be out there, she expects none of them will last very long. 

But Vern and her children survive, and Vern begins to see visions, and feel supernatural strength.  And upon sneaking out of the forest to civilization for a few moments, she begins to feel more as well, to find feelings that were always denied to her in the past.  But when Vern's body begins to ache and feature a strange bodily substance on her back, she knows she can't stay in the forest for much longer if her kids are going to survive. 

And so Vern, along with Feral and Howling, flees the forest into civilization, searching for the only address she knows, the one that the girl she once loved once gave her.  But what Vern finds is a world just as cruel as it was in Blessed Acres and revelations about what she is and is becoming that will change everything forever....and might make it impossible for her to keep fighting......
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Sorrowland takes place from the perspective of Vern, a teenager forced into too many things at once for survival from a young age - she's 15 and pregnant with twins at the start of the book, hiding in the jungle from the cult she grew up in.  Vern doesn't really fit in anywhere - she's an albino child who grew up in a cult that centered around black power, she's never quite felt like a girl* in a religious community that is misogynistic and patriarchal at its core, she's never believed in any religion or god (and again grew up in a religious cult essentially), etc.  But what Vern is, through and through, is a fighter - first for the very idea that she and her children will not live and die under the constraints of Blessed Acres, and then for the idea that they will survive, regardless of what is happening to her, regardless of the racial and structural forces arrayed against her, etc.  This makes Vern relatable but also incredibly prickly and prone to distrust, as she's used to fighting everything and not used to the occasional bits of kindness she might encounter in the world...especially as many such kindnesses have turned out to be false in her past.  

*The book uses she/her pronouns for both Vern and the other character who turns out to be genderqueer/non-binary, so I will do the same in this review.*

And Vern faces a ton of adversity to fight against - first a village based upon a culture of black supremacy that uses its religion to control its women, children, and anyone who doesn't fit into the clear definition of being a man; then the challenge of raising two sons in the jungle alone, with a mysterious person around her to try to scare and hunt her; then trying to survive with the children in civilization as she desperately searches for the only shelter she can imagine; and then finally, seemingly in safety, to figure out what she is truly and what her feelings are for Gogo, the medically trained winkte (NB) Lakota who helps her....and then more I won't spoil here.  And really what she's fighting against through all of it a society that oppresses and abuses anyone who isn't in what it considers the norm, whether that be because they're people of color, or because they don't fit into the cis-heteronorm, or just because they refuse to bow down to what people of authority dictate for them.  And Solomon doesn't spare the reader in how oppression and abuse takes place, with a significant portion, but not all of it, coming through human experimentation in a more sci-fi way but otherwise no more unusual of a way than actually happened in real life. 

And through the plot and through Vern, Solomon makes clear that even many among the oppressed can be complicit in such activities - the way the Cainites are here, or more specifically how Vern's mother bought in and lets it happen to her.  And Solomon makes a strong case that we should understand why such people do such a thing....while also pointing out that such understanding doesn't necessarily mean we should forgive them for it.   Sorrowland's plot may take a little bit to start going, and definitely gets hard to read at times, but its strong character work and themes are pretty powerful from beginning to end - and unlike An Unkindness of Ghosts, this one ends on what's kind of a hopeful note, even if not an idealistic one.  

So yeah Sorrowland is a tremendous second novel and well worth your time - and if it picks up award nominations for next year, I will be far from stunned.  It's not a perfect novel - there's one segment that randomly switches point of view characters which goes nowhere - but it's tremendously poignant and powerful and fascinating at all times, which is what Solomon has become clearly known for.  



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