The Sirens by Emilia Hart
Narrator: Barrie Kreinik
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Australian history, fantasy, historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 352
Length: 10 hours and 56 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, St. Martin's Press on February 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A story of sisters separated by hundreds of years but bound together in more ways than they can imagine
2019: Lucy awakens in her ex-lover’s room in the middle of the night with her hands around his throat. Horrified, she flees to her sister’s house on the coast of New South Wales hoping Jess can help explain the vivid dreams that preceded the attack—but her sister is missing. As Lucy waits for her return, she starts to unearth strange rumours about Jess’s town—tales of numerous missing men, spread over decades. A baby abandoned in a sea-swept cave. Whispers of women’s voices on the waves. All the while, her dreams start to feel closer than ever.
1800: Mary and Eliza are torn from their loving home in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship heading for Australia. As the boat takes them farther and farther away from all they know, they begin to notice unexplainable changes in their bodies.
A breathtaking tale of female resilience, The Sirens is an extraordinary novel that captures the sheer power of sisterhood and the indefinable magic of the sea.

My Review:

The Sirens turned out to be a book that I just plain need to get out of my system so I can make like Elsa and “let it go”. And that’s not a good thing.

Normally I do a plot summary/commentary first, but I don’t think I can here because saying anything more than is in the blurb would be a spoiler as nothing is revealed at the start. The whole story is about secrets and their very slow reveal in a family that has so much dysfunction – and such a unique dysfunction at that – that it lasts centuries. If not longer.

It takes place in two distinct timelines two centuries apart, the early 1800s and the early 2000s. The stories are wrapped around a pair of sisters in each timeline, seemingly joined by a rare and common disease. Or a birth defect. Or a genetic anomaly. Or perhaps, all of the above.

They’re not exactly allergic to water, but they all have aquagenic urticaria, which is a real thing that Mary and her sister Eliza certainly wouldn’t have had a name for in the early 1800s, although Jess and her sister Lucy in the early 21st century certainly do. Not that it helps, particularly as their expression of the condition seems unique to the four of them. They don’t get hives, they get scales – and sprout gills.

The story both is, and isn’t, about their shared condition. Rather, it’s about the secrets that are kept from them because of it, and the events that occur as a result of their need or desire to hide it and the traumas that are a consequence of all of the above.

That Jess and Lucy are both dreaming of Mary and Eliza throughout the story, and experience their fate with them within those dreams, links the past and the present in ways that Jess and Lucy don’t expect – but the reader certainly does long before the story comes to its conclusion.

Escape Rating C: I came so very close to DNF’ing this one really early on. The only reason I kept going is that I received an ALC (Advance Listening Copy) through Netgalley and that’s one queue I try to keep relatively clean. I tried reading the thing instead because that would be faster but couldn’t manage that either, so I stayed with the audio and increased the speed – which I seldom do because I’m normally there for the voices.

The narrator in this particular case, Barrie Kreinik, was very good and I’d certainly be willing to listen to another book she narrated. She even sang, and sang well, the parts that needed singing, but the book as a whole drove me so far round the bend that I just needed to get it done.

I honestly expected to like this. And I did like the historical parts – both because the history is fascinating and because, in spite of Mary’s story being ‘told’ through Jess’ and Lucy’s dreams, Mary and Eliza’s story was still mostly ‘shown’ rather than ‘told’. We see the action – and its results, as they happen, and it’s raw and harrowing and immediate even though it takes place two centuries ago. Mary may be filled with angst and fear and regret – and she often is and rightfully so considering what happens to her – but in the moment she acts and doesn’t angst before and regurgitate after.

Which is far from the case when it comes to Lucy’s story. Lucy’s story is not merely told instead of shown nearly all the time, but it’s told in the most distancing way possible. First she angsts over what’s about to happen. Then she angsts over it while it’s happening and we see the event through her emotions about the event rather than the event itself. Afterwards she chews over the event that has already passed and angsts about it even more.

The thing is that the story is told from inside Lucy’s head, but we’re not actually in Lucy’s head. Instead the story is told from a third-person perspective that puts Lucy’s thoughts and emotions at a distance. That so much of Lucy’s story is told either through Lucy listening to podcasts or Lucy reading newspaper articles and Jess’ diary puts even more distance in that distance.

So we’re not close enough to Lucy to FEEL with her, and her pattern of telling most of the parts of the story three times made it difficult for me to feel FOR her as I just wanted her to get on with it. That I figured things out LONG before she did left me waiting for someone or something to hit her with a clue-by-four because she really, really needed one.

Putting it another way, Lucy’s story is distant because it’s filtered and chewed over and gnawed at and angsted about. We get so much of Lucy processing her story, like a cow chewing its cud, that we don’t experience it. And it feels as if neither does she.

In the end, I got left with a whole heaping helping of mixed feelings. The story turned out to be a whole lot of atmosphere, often creepy, a great deal of deserved angst and not a lot of action until very near the end when all the various plot threads come to an ending that should have been a surprise but mostly wasn’t. The historical story about the horrors of the convict transport ships that carried prisoners from Britain to Australia was searing and horrifying every nautical mile. It was a dark journey and a dark time in a dark age.

The concept of Jess’ and Lucy’s part of the story had the potential to tell a story of female resilience and the power of sisterhood, but that part of the story got lost in the slow and repetitious way that it was told. There was so much potential in this story, but too much of it got washed away by the tides.

Of course, your reading mileage – even measured in nautical miles, kilometers or fathoms – may vary.