Em's Reviews > The Sirens

This was a very fast read for me as I finished the same day I began. Emilia Hart's prose in The Sirens is, as in Weyward, tremendously readable, compelling, timely and important.

On the surface, this is the story of two estranged sisters, Jess and Lucy, both dealing with a form of abuse from boyfriends who in the beginning looked at them in a way that made them "feel special" until they realized what they were seeing was just the boys' own "ego[s] reflected back." The suspense in this storyline develops rapidly, beginning with Lucy's unnatural sleepwalking and her sudden impulse to see her sister whom she feels is the only person who might understand her. We learn that she has long felt alienated from her own body due to a strange skin condition of colored scales in just a few places around her body, a condition she shares with Jess. She leaves university to talk to Jess but when she arrives at her small house by the ocean cliffs, she discovers that Jess is MIA. Lucy does discover Jess' diary, however, and she eventually reads it for clues about where Jess might be. The diary entries act as the first real window she's ever had into her sister's life.

This is also the story of women horribly mistreated on a prison ship bound to Australia, all of their trials and tribulations, and the author's attempt to "write them back into history." Naturally these two storylines do eventually feed into one another.

At its heart, on a deeper level, this is a novel about the trauma of silences which affect women--the current silences kept out of shame, out of the fear of being misunderstood or simply not believed--and the silences of past unclaimed experiences which perpetuate because history refuses to admit to them. Emilia Hart's characters are in no way victims, however. They are proactive young women learning to find their voices even in the conspiracies of silence all around them.