Michelle Dsouza
I distrust dual timelines. Too often they're a structural crutch, a way to manufacture tension by withholding information across two threads that don't actually need each other. The Sirens made me forget I distrust them at all. Emilia Hart moves between past and present so seamlessly that the transitions feel inevitable rather than engineered. Every time one timeline handed off to the other, it landed at exactly the right moment.
The book follows Lucy, who wakes from a sleepwalking episode with her hands around her ex's throat and flees to her estranged sister Jess's house on the coast, only to find Jess missing. Threaded through Lucy's present is the story of Mary and Eliza, sisters transported on a convict ship to Australia in 1800, and a deeper history of water, transformation, and a kind of feminine power that runs in the blood. The Mary and Eliza timeline is the one that gripped me hardest. Their chapters carry the emotional weight of the book, and Hart writes them with a clarity that never tips into melodrama despite everything they endure.
What I loved most is that Hart commits fully to both the mythic and the human. The magical elements aren't decoration. They drive the plot and deepen the themes rather than sitting on top of them. The water, the transformation, the inheritance of suffering and survival across generations of women, all of it works because Hart trusts it.
There's a moment with a lionfish that genuinely stopped me. Robert watches the siren in the cave, beautiful and vicious all at once, and sees a lionfish in her. When he tries to draw her, it feels like pinning a butterfly for study, taking something that flickers with life and killing it. He refuses to do that to her. So instead he draws a lionfish, secretly, as a way to hold onto her without trapping her. It's a small, tender act of restraint, and it captures something the whole book is reaching for: how do you love something wild without destroying the wildness that made you love it.
What stayed with me is the hope. The Sirens is a book full of trauma, but it refuses to end there. It insists that suffering can be turned into something, that survival is its own kind of power, that all is not always lost. After a run of books that confused sadness with depth, this one earns its darkness and then earns its way back out of it.
My one real frustration is the student/teacher subplot. It felt like it was there to serve the plot rather than because it deserved a place in the book, and Melody's story about Ryan Smith landed the same way: a detail the book didn't need. Both moments pulled me briefly out of a story that otherwise held me completely.
The pacing is the quiet hero here. I read this in 24 hours and didn't want to stop. Borrowed from the library and already planning to buy my own copy, which is the highest compliment I have.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
I distrust dual timelines. Too often they're a structural crutch, a way to manufacture tension by withholding information across two threads that don't actually need each other. The Sirens made me forget I distrust them at all. Emilia Hart moves between past and present so seamlessly that the transitions feel inevitable rather than engineered. Every time one timeline handed off to the other, it landed at exactly the right moment.
The book follows Lucy, who wakes from a sleepwalking episode with her hands around her ex's throat and flees to her estranged sister Jess's house on the coast, only to find Jess missing. Threaded through Lucy's present is the story of Mary and Eliza, sisters transported on a convict ship to Australia in 1800, and a deeper history of water, transformation, and a kind of feminine power that runs in the blood. The Mary and Eliza timeline is the one that gripped me hardest. Their chapters carry the emotional weight of the book, and Hart writes them with a clarity that never tips into melodrama despite everything they endure.
What I loved most is that Hart commits fully to both the mythic and the human. The magical elements aren't decoration. They drive the plot and deepen the themes rather than sitting on top of them. The water, the transformation, the inheritance of suffering and survival across generations of women, all of it works because Hart trusts it.
There's a moment with a lionfish that genuinely stopped me. Robert watches the siren in the cave, beautiful and vicious all at once, and sees a lionfish in her. When he tries to draw her, it feels like pinning a butterfly for study, taking something that flickers with life and killing it. He refuses to do that to her. So instead he draws a lionfish, secretly, as a way to hold onto her without trapping her. It's a small, tender act of restraint, and it captures something the whole book is reaching for: how do you love something wild without destroying the wildness that made you love it.
What stayed with me is the hope. The Sirens is a book full of trauma, but it refuses to end there. It insists that suffering can be turned into something, that survival is its own kind of power, that all is not always lost. After a run of books that confused sadness with depth, this one earns its darkness and then earns its way back out of it.
My one real frustration is the student/teacher subplot. It felt like it was there to serve the plot rather than because it deserved a place in the book, and Melody's story about Ryan Smith landed the same way: a detail the book didn't need. Both moments pulled me briefly out of a story that otherwise held me completely.
The pacing is the quiet hero here. I read this in 24 hours and didn't want to stop. Borrowed from the library and already planning to buy my own copy, which is the highest compliment I have.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.