Kasia's Reviews > The Sirens

**ARC of this book provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review**

Have you ever read a feminist novel where author tries so hard to show all women as saints that inadvertently strips them of any personality and agency? This is one of them.

We are following three women - Lucy, Jess and Mary - across three different timelines. Lucy and Jess are estranged sisters that seem to have a very strained relationship due to the big age difference. The story focuses on Lucy in 2019 when she flees her university after assaulting her peer during a sleepwalking episode. For some unexplained reason she decides to show up on her older sister doorstep only to discover the doors unlocked, her sisters phone still in the house and Jess nowhere to be found. That does not ring any alarm bells so Lucy gets comfy in the house and starts snooping. The town Lucy finds herself in has its own mystery - 8 men going missing without any trace and a baby found in one of the caves in the '80. At some points Lucy decides that they are all connected and a very anemic investigation ensues. In the meantime Lucy finds her older sister diary from 1998 and we get chapters covering that time. The diary reveals some family secrets so investigation about what happened to 8 missing men is unceremoniously abandoned to focus on family drama. Lucy also dreams about Mary - a young woman sentenced for her crimes to be sent to Australia's penal colony in 1800 - and as a result we are getting chapters from the Mary's POV.

It seems like there are a lot of things happening in this book but when I was reading it, it was feeling strangely uneventful. Lucy mops around the house a lot, Mary spends majority of her time in the darkness, locked in the cargo space of the transportation ship. There is little logic to Lucy's actions and following her made for a real ordeal. Why she investigates some random guys missing instead of looking for her sister? Why she is not asking questions but waits for everything to be revealed to her? Why she fled the university in the first place? Leaving with no explanation makes the whole assault look even worse.

Ok but what about all those mysteries? Everything is foreshadowed so heavily that I figured them out way before the characters so then I was just waiting for someone or something to show up and reveal everything to Lucy. It was annoying me to no end that author describes Lucy as very driven person with the passion for journalism but there is not even an ounce of proactiveness in her. Also this is a feminist novel so you know that all the bad things in the world will happen only because of all men being sexual predators. Women are those gentle creatures that have no other way of facing the world than enduring the injustices.

Another disappointing aspect of this novel was that it signaled a desire to explore morality of its characters but it never did it. In the end everything is very flat and, dare I say it, trivial. Women are always good and men are always bad. Women always support each other, they don't condemn other women, they only condemn men. Women have a reason to all their actions, men are working on the impulse, driven only by their sexual needs. There are two positive male figures in the book and they are both fathers. Ah, scratch that - one of the fathers in one of the final chapters acts on his sexual needs and even when author tries to frame it as a good action it still left a sour taste in my mouth.

I don't like when enduring is the only way for women to exist in this world. I don't like when the world is flattened to contain only good or only bad characters. I don't like when the characters need to be held by the hand and lead by the plot from one answer to another. To sum it up - I can't recommend this book.