Chlorine
A Novel
-
-
3.6 • 10 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
In the vein of The Pisces and The Vegetarian, Chlorine is a debut novel that blurs the line between a literary coming-of-age narrative and a dark unsettling horror tale, told from an adult perspective on the trials and tribulations of growing up in a society that puts pressure on young women and their bodies… a powerful, relevant novel of immigration, sapphic longing, and fierce, defiant becoming.
Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach is her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life.
But these are human concerns. These are the concerns of those confined to land, those with legs. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Creatures that called sailors to their doom. That dragged them down and drowned them. That feasted on their flesh. The creature that she’s always longed to become: the mermaid.
Ren aches to be in the water. She dreams of the scent of chlorine, the feel of it on her skin. And she will do anything she can to make a life for herself where she can be free. No matter the pain. No matter what anyone else thinks. No matter how much blood she has to spill.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Song's disturbing and visionary debut, a child pushed too hard to succeed becomes a monster of her own making. Ren Yu, a Chinese American teen, is obsessed with water and mermaids, specifically the Native American Passamaquoddy mermaids who killed their would-be colonizers. After she lands a spot on her school's swim team, she imagines the chlorinated water is transforming her body into that of a mermaid. Her overbearing coach pushes Ren's boundaries with inappropriate touching, and his exacting standards lead Ren and her teammates to develop unhealthy eating habits and body dysphoria. Ren's father, meanwhile, moves back to China, and both of her parents stress the importance of Ren landing admission to an Ivy League school. To cope with the pressure, Ren turns to sex and drugs, and by the end, an early allusion about her mermaid's tail is revealed in all its Cronenberg-esque glory. The body horror is striking, as is Song's prose, in which she riffs on the various ways the team members are "mutilated" ("We mutilated our beauty, though this sense of beauty was an outdated version defined by narrow wrists and bird bones"). It's a singular coming-of-age.
