The Scaled and Interwoven World of 'The Sirens' by Emilia Hart
A book review
A shipwreck with lingering lore, a series of men swallowed by the sea, unlovely, stunning siren imagery, threads connecting what women and people raised as women have endured through the entirety of patriarchy, art, storytelling, a hunger for truth, and a missing sister who has left behind a mold eaten journal. The Sirens is a story with oceanic depth and seaweed nets connecting us all.
One of many things I loved about Emilia Hart’s first novel, Weyward, was that she wove the story using bright red threads of the complexity of being human. She didn’t avoid the rough edges or frayed inner walls of living. Her characters bloomed with nuance, and she told that story in a way that asked the reader to peer into a mirror, to see themselves in even the most uncomfortable moments.
She has outdone herself with her new novel, The Sirens, bringing the same mirror to the reader. Emilia Hart, simply by embodying her role as a storyteller, invites us to see ourselves as complicated beings bent on survival. And so we do.
In Bridie, who sells her body for food on a prisoner transport ship heading to New South Wales.
In Eva, who despises her for it and yet harbors her own jagged secrets.
In Lucy, who has never belonged and who finds herself the subject of sexual harm in the arms of a fellow college student, whose reputation will be spared simply because he is a he and he comes from a family with wealth and status.
In Mary, who has locked away memory in her body, unable to access it again, but determined to stay locked arm in arm with her twin sister.
In Jess, who has kept Lucy at arm’s length, pouring herself into art and a life lived far from her family.
In Eliza, who cannot see the world, yet who witnesses everything the people around her miss.
In the people who keep secrets, who hoard them out of love, but still can’t ever decide if they’ve made the right choice. In the people who know what a mob will do to them if they catch a whiff of their otherness. In the survivors of sexual assault, of bloated accusations - the ones whose loved ones want them to stay as compact and typical as possible because they’re afraid of losing them.
We are in this story. All of us who were not born as white cishet men. All of us who have fought off predators. All of us who are still uncertain if consent for one thing meant we consented to another (it does not). All of us who have been othered, who have hidden our metaphorical scales and gills below our tight, cracking skin.
“She ached for a glimpse of the coast, a blue slice of sea, even though they had to be miles and miles away, still.
It was as if someone had cast an invisible wire across the land, had caught her between the ribs and pulled.
The sea was in her veins, calling loud as a song.”
Emilia Hart, The Sirens
Emilia Hart has given us a mirror, and she, like all good storytellers, has not attempted to tell us what we should encounter when we look into it. She’s just laid out what is both mundane and what is mythological. In between the two, we find a thin place, a timelessness, a crack in the world that is capable of being a sort of seer.
The Sirens is a book that immediately brought to mind The Seven Skins of Esther Wildling from our beloved
.A younger sister searching for a missing older sister - in Esther’s case, the search is for Aura’s hidden story, and in Lucy’s case, she’s looking for where Jess has disappeared to.
The soft lapping of folklore over the pages of the story.
The complicated relationships bolstering what had always felt… off.
The call of the sea.
These stories are themselves sisters.
The Seven Skins of Esther Wildling remains one of my favorite stories, and I’ve nestled The Sirens next to her, cover to cover, on my shelf. I don’t know if I’ll ever again recommend one without the other.
Click below to read my review of The Seven Skins of Esther Wildling
There’s an element of writing fiction that I’ve been chewing on for years, and it is not something I came to on my own. It’s been other readers - almost always Black and/or Indigenous - asking for white authors to check in with themselves before they attempt to create a main character whose marginalized experience they have not themselves lived. I am certain I am not alone in holding the same belief, as a cis woman, for writing a primary character who is trans/nonbinary.
These representations are vital to every story - no white author should be writing yet another book of entirely white people. There is literally no one on this planet who needs another story of white cishet people that both forgets and erases the powerful, stunning, vivid world we truly live in.
White people are not the human collective’s main character. Cis people are not the human collective’s main character. Heterosexual people are not the human collective’s main character. And because of that, it is the duty of every white/cis/het author to lean into the uncomfortable, unfamiliar waters of consciously observing the story they are breathing into the world. Both in print and in life. It is our most important work to ensure that we are creating stories that do not tread hungrily over the lives of marginalized people and yet do not exclude them from the narrative.
It’s a fine line, isn’t it? It is our line to learn.
I loved witnessing Emilia Hart do exactly that.
Emilia is Australian, and she honors the land she wrote both from and about in a way that I repeatedly found so admirable. She did not create her own whitewashed version of a voice for that land or for its people. Instead, she introduced her story with a solid, unwavering honesty about the long story of violence, invasion, and colonization. She set the stage by telling us she is not the one to tell that story from the perspective of a people who have endured it.
No, Emilia is telling us a story about Irish women who were crammed into the belly of a prisoner transport ship and sent to a land they did not choose to go to. She tells us about Female Farms, where those women would be sent, a place where men could buy a wife, a maid, or both.
In an interview at the end of the book, Emilia says she wanted to write this story because her own ancestor captained a ship like that. It is a story warped and woven into her DNA, so she tells the truth of it without ever once making it sound sweeter, kinder, or more humane than it ever was.
And in a stunning moment near the end of the book, Emilia personifies the land from far off. She sees how it is a green and living thing, how it has hidden away its people, and her character resolves to never be a part of what was done to them. It was a moment of choice. A moment when one being stripped of agency recognizes the same in another and resolves to never add their weight against the wound.
“The coast rose behind them, a dark curve. [She] felt a power humming from it. She saw eyes burning bright in a great forest, faces framed by pale trees. The land had hidden her people in her belly for thousands of years, but now the English - men like the captain and his officers - had come to split her open. [She] would have no part in it, she decided. She would not venture beyond the rocks and cave in the cliffs. She would leave the land and her people alone.”
-Emilia Hart, The Sirens
It reminds me of something I heard Holly Ringland say when I met her at Powell’s Books for her Esther Wildling book tour. She said that the land we are on - all of us, no matter where we are - has its own stories. Holly wrote about selkies because the stories of seal women had traveled with Esther’s ancestors from Denmark to Lutruwita (Tasmania), but she didn’t try to drown out the already thriving, abundant stories rooted in Lutruwita with new ones. In fact, with permission, she wrote sacred language and rituals belonging to aboriginal people into the book - ones that we are allowed to witness, but not participate in.
There is room enough for our stories to be shared, to travel from body to body, and I felt the glowing spark of what I had learned from Holly in Emilia’s writing. The choice of a character to not to step foot on a land that was doing its very best to cradle its people deep in the womb of the earth, the willingness to mirror one another without needing to conquer or override what is already so uniquely alive. We are learning, reading, and adjusting ourselves into the flow of anti-colonial storytelling, and I hope it marks something as important for you as it has for me.
I listened to the last chapter of The Sirens late at night with my bedroom window wide open. The sound of soft, dark breeze mingled with the smell of fresh spring leaves and, in that greening energy, the final bits of Emilia’s story settled into the cracks of my skin and soul. I thought about the sexual harm I’d survived, about the accusations of religious men that I’ve dropped into the sea more times than I can count. I thought about the parts of me that are rough and sharply edged, about the parts of me that are smooth and scaled and awake.
“Da had made becoming a woman sound like something dangerous.”
-Emilia Hart, The Sirens
I thought about the precise way folklore and mythology tell us about ourselves, and about how much I grieve when people bypass them as fantasy or silly. I thought about the storytellers out there spending years in deep research, trembling as they type, holding up the mirror to catch their own well-meaning missteps as they go. I thought about Holly’s novels and the way they let me see my own self. And I thought about how precious and rare it is to find another novel written by another woman that unknowingly sisters Lucy (The Sirens) to Esther (The Seven Skins of Esther Wildling).
As if sister souls of bright inspiration had sought out Holly and Emilia, stories that wanted to be brought into the world in unique ways, but who demanded they always be able to find their way back to one another in the end.
“A prickle starts at the base of Lucy's spine. Maybe it's the knowledge of what the water would do to her skin. She imagines the waves lapping at her like tongues, stripping her of flesh until she is nothing but bone, gleaming white.
Or perhaps it's the podcast; the thought of all those missing men, presumed drowned. But with the prickling fear there's a strange pull, too. Lucy struggles to tear her gaze from the bright waves, mesmerized by the way they curl over the shore. A part of her wants to get closer, to feel spindrift on her face, slick rock beneath her palms.”
-Emilia Hart, The Sirens
The Sirens is a book you will not forget, one you should read with the knowledge that stories about sexual assault, the stripping of agency, and othering will repeatedly appear. If you aren’t able to hold that right now, then let it wait. But if you are hungry for a Red Tent, a sacred space where anyone born outside of a white cishet imagination will find haven - if you are also learning how to tell the truth of your own ancestry paired with surviving a rigid, unevolving world without trampling over others - this may be a part of that.
Ten out of ten, honeys. There’s no other way for me to recommend The Sirens but to tell you I would read it again and again and again.
Happy reading, wild kin.
*All the links direct to my affiliate link at bookshop.org. If you’d like to try libro.fm, a version of audible that is not owned by Amazon, you can download it HERE.