A visceral and startling debut novel by Jade Song, Chlorine is a portrait of ambition, defiance and longing set in the world of competitive swimming… Song invites readers to enter into Ren's obsessions not with judgment or disgust, but with an understanding that is surprisingly tender in the face of the novel's abrasion.” — Shelf Awareness I think I would transcend into the mermaid with rainbow armor. Or maybe I’d be a goth cyborg mermaid . Or maybe I’d be one of the cute mermaids illustrated on this valentine my friend sent me, which said “we ‘mer-maid’ to be friends”—basically, I change my mind all the time, which is part of the fun and freedom of queer transcendence. I guess I’d be the kind of mermaid who transcends into whoever they want to be on each different day. otherwise it tended more toward melodrama and hit-you-over-the-head themes and arguments. here's an example, when our protagonist has recently sustained a head injury and is conspicuously refusing to answer her doctor's very normal question (how's the pain): Turning the possibility of pure empowerment on its head, Song forces us to question Ren’s reliability as a narrator at the same time as she provocatively suggests that the truth is perhaps, irrelevant. What’s more important is that in Chlorine, Ren gets to write her own myth—what Fredric Jameson (by way of Claude Lévi-Strauss) once called “the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction”—that she can bridge the aporia of her life on her own terms. And what we’re left with is an aching siren song, one that points us towards those uncharted dimensions of desire and identity that swim and shimmer, in and out of being. big words and long sentences do not a good writer make. in fact, in this book, they make for a writing style that is pathetically self-conscious, so obviously eager to impress that it is genuinely embarrassing to read. when not beating you over the head with Earnest Messaging, this book makes word salad of the simplest phrases. even the most entry-level editor could have easily halved its length.

I didn’t intend for Chlorine to be horror because many of the horrors in the novel—for example, blood pouring out of a body because of menstruation; body horror because of self-harm; stalkerish shadows because of abuses of power—already exist in real life. These horrors are real! I suppose Chlorine is contemporary horror because the novel is gory and creepy and disturbing, but I think reality is gory and creepy and disturbing. I’m not sure how to sugar-coat these experiences or pretend it doesn’t happen. People bleed, people self-harm, people are abusive. People hurt others even when they’re trying to love. So, to me, Chlorine is both contemporary horror and contemporary literary fiction. To be honest, it kinda makes me giggle when people are like, oh, this was really hard to read, because in my head, I’m just like, well, many of my friends and I, we lived it. Sometimes it’s really hard to live. Life is the horror genre.An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Chlorine is about the reclamation of tender monstrosity. It’s about athletic discipline/delusion. But most of all, Chlorine is about the longing to be free. The book itself is also a sort of literary mermaid, existing comfortably between genres and age classifications. “Chlorine” is an adult novel with a teenage protagonist, though narrated by an adult. It juxtaposes modern slang in dialogue against vivid, elaborate prose. The book has elements of horror and is ambiguously fantastical — readers are never quite able to trust Ren’s unreliable assertion about being a mermaid. Ren’s delusion that she is a mermaid might(?) be because of her concussion, and her brain damage progressively getting worse because she didn’t treat it correctly, but it’s never fleshed out. When Ren first gets the concussion, she sees a mermaid tail in the stars. She also sees everyone in the hospital as fish people. This never comes up again. Several years later, she has a mental break where she thinks she’s a mermaid, but it’s not portrayed as the concussion caused some sort of damage that progressively got worse. All the concussion does is give her chronic headaches. So why was she hallucinating fish people in the hospital? What was the point of that? I am alone. A-lone. A-, a prefix meaning 'without.' I am without you. I miss you." an installment of cathy's letters to ren, which i generally found to be purple prose-y and tonally inconsistent with cathy's speaking voice (which confuses me bc i feel like high schoolers' personal writing often sounds a Lot like their speaking voices but i am also pretty sure jade song was going for a certain effect here so the discrepancy is likely intentional). this line bewildered me because what novel thing am i learning from diagraming this word? it just feels like an effort to be poetic without substance.

Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Ren Yu is a fierce young woman who’s dreamed of mermaids ever since she can remember-dreams so vivid that the first touch of water in a swimming pool alters her life forever, sending her down a path that’s both beautiful and frightening. Chlorine isn’t just a coming of age story. It’s the tale of transformation from human to something wilder and more transcendent. It’s about love and longing and the willingness to do anything to become who you truly are‘– Richard Kadrey, New York Times-bestselling author of the SANDMAN SLIM series Fierce... so vivi d... both b eautif ul and frightening. Chlorine isn’t just a coming of age story. It’s the tale of transformation from human to something wilder and more transcendent. It’s about lov e and longing and the willingness to do anything to become who you truly are." I didn’t enjoy the writing. I didn’t enjoy the story. There’s not much about this book that I particularly enjoy at all. I do like the author though. Jade Song (she/they) has a nice social media presence, they seem cool and maybe with more maturity, I’ll read a better book by them. I like their love of Wong Kar-Wai and Leslie Cheung films because same.Ren is 12 in this scene. Where did she get this idea that she needs to please men? I certainly didn’t have this need to please men at the age of 12. I guess the author just assumes that every little girl is beaten down by evil men all their lives, and they’re taught to obey and please men, because that’s all women are good for to men. Like wtf. Ms. Song is good on the growing pains of young adulthood…[This is] a book that enlivens its coming-of-age yarn with a touch of mystery and a twist of myth.” — The Economist

We mutilated our hair, cultivating our arm leg pit vagina hair for months like farmers growing wheat, until we cropped it off in one hour, together at the shaving party before the big meet. a tender story of a lonely outcast girl who just wanted to transcend into a body which reveled in power not pain.” — The Fantasy Hive or even better, when the narrator is supposed to be SEVEN YEARS OLD, she tells her mom: “Swimming can be my extracurricular activity on my college applications. The coach said I showed raw talent.” Yes! I have a themed speculative short story collection finished, with some of the stories published already in various literary magazines like The Missouri Review and Salamander Magazine . I’m currently revising a new novel manuscript centered around grief and friend-love and work and precarity in New York City. Chlorine came from a place of anger, while this new novel comes from a place of love. I’m excited to grow as an artist and try something new.

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There’s a scene in this book of the first time Ren gets her period. Apparently it took Ren and her mother, working together, 7 hours to insert a tampon into Ren. That seems overdramatic. I have never met anyone with such an experience as this. He inhaled and lifted the whistle to his mouth, but before he could blow, I dove into the pool. I couldn’t wait any longer. I was so close. I wanted to touch water without other children inside it too. Their bodies would have corrupted my experience. And I had already grasped how men liked it when I did things they wanted without them needing to ask first. or let’s try: “I’m confined to a comprehension of human difficulties through an American lens, no matter how hard I try to break out of the star-spangled brainwashing I was subject to from a young girl’s age.” Though Song leaves much to the reader’s imagination, I personally saw this novel as a tender story of a lonely outcast girl who just wanted to transcend into a body which revelled in power not pain. I absolutely loved the way the ending leaves the reader to decide Ren’s fate. Was she finally free?

The final result of this is that Ren does earn her tail, but not by any supernatural force. Instead, she sews her legs together in a climactic scene that is Song’s writing at its most revulsive and sumptuous. Crucially, this moment is described not merely as a visceral account of physical extremity, but as a prolonged, psychically sublime process that forces us to consider how freedom and punishment are perhaps inextricable. How what we want to believe will unfetter us might never be totally distinct from the violent forces of the world; but is tainted too, and therefore has a shredded, carnal beauty. I leave this book feeling meh, in that there is potential, but it doesn’t quite reach the mark of greatness. The fact that it is marketed as a dark, magic-realism-esque, girl-reclaims-her-body-and-selfhood narrative, but is, at its core, an unabashedly, culturally American high school athlete story, makes the mermaid aspect hard to believe.But I was meant to be selfish—my self, meeting the fish. In a way, my breaking compounded my ascendancy, though it was never I who did the actual breaking. It was my head, the people, and the systems around me. There is so much I could say about this book, and I won't even try to cover it all in this review. Ren's experiences, while on one hand, is not anything I've ever experienced (I certainly was NOT a competitive swimmer), but on the other hand, I related a lot to some of the other things she was struggling through. Coming to terms with her cultural identity and queerness, the pressure of being the perfect child and trying to live up to the hopes and dreams of your immigrant parents, and even her deep mistrust of doctors are all things that stood out to me. Even though Ren was such a toxic character, I found myself empathizing with her a lot simply because I could relate to her so deeply. I didn't like her, but I understood her, and I think that's a testament to how well Song crafted Ren as a character. A strikingly original coming-of-age story . . . Full of contradictions, magnificently balancing and remarkably sustaining wonder with dread and magical realism with harsh reality, with a heartbreakingly beautiful and intensely uneasy tone, this is a story that will hold readers in its thrall. [A] great choice for fans of weird, immersive, female-driven body horror by authors like Julia Armfield, Cassandra Khaw, and Carmen Maria Machado’– Booklist starred review