Last night I read The Siren by Kiera Cass. It’s great to read a book in one day. While I was reading for my oral comps, I should have averaged a book a day, but I felt guilty skimming something I was going to be tested on, and I felt stressed at spending at least 3 days taking in a book properly. My reading life is much better on the other side of the defense. I know reading a YA book won’t help me write my dissertation, but it definitely helps me feel well-rounded and connected to current trends in my special topic of fairy tales.
The Siren is the first standalone book Cass has written, and just like her Selection series, this book makes frequent and explicit references to the fairy tale genre. I suspected this would be a re-vision of “The Little Mermaid,” but instead it draws upon siren folklore generally. I enjoy the book’s meta moments: the siren protagonists of the novel research folklore themselves to gain understanding of their supernatural constitution. The narrator mentions paintings, fairy tales, literary short stories, and internet searches; it seems like a recitation of the author’s own research for the book.
The book is written for, as the author says in her acknowledgments, an audience primarily made up of teenage girls. The protagonist, Kahlen, at 19 years old seems to be the oldest in a sisterhood of sirens. The girls are changed from human to siren when the Ocean answers their pleas to be saved from drowning. The kicker here is that the Ocean is not just a kindly spirit; She has to eat humans in order to survive. In order to continue feeding and sustaining the planet, the Ocean recruits 2-5 human girls for a century of service. The girls, understanding only that they don’t want to die, end up singing ships to their death to feed their mother/employer/warden (as Kahlen puts it) around once a year. It is not stated, but it seems that the sirens’ seductive powers are more important than ever before now that ship travel has been reduced in an age of air travel. The girls make one ship go down in the Bermuda Triangle seemingly without cause, and the news media makes much of the fact that modern-day sailing has too many safeguards to make sinking without a known cause implausible.
The juxtaposition of ancient myth with 24-hour dance clubs in New York City are part of what make modern retellings of fairy tales fun. However, I wish that the difficult ways this juxtaposition would actually play out within the storyworld had been explicitly teased out a bit more. We are not told that the Ocean relies more heavily on her sirens than ever before, but as a reader making my own connections to real-world history I can assume that. It seems harder to keep a secret like the sentience of the Ocean today. Today the entire world can communicate new knowledge, and we have more people on the planet capable of making new discoveries. Humans actively want to figure out how the world works, and we have been making further journeys into the deep recesses of the ocean than ever before. The ocean will not forever remain a mystery in the real world, and it seems implausible that it could in the storyworld either. Extending that, the Ocean’s fear that humans would find a way to stay off of the Ocean entirely, should they learn Her true nature, seems scientifically implausible. Yes, humans have been creating ever-better robots. But the Ocean, as a sentient being, could crash those just as She does ships. Humans then could not harvest food from the Ocean. Given our huge population, losing that enormous food source would (I imagine) mean mass famine. In our own real world, overfishing is already depleting our food supplies; in the storyworld, famine would be unavoidable. Desperate humans, then, would set up some sort of tithe of human lives to the Ocean to gain access to fishing again. But that’s just me spinning on away from the book itself; I enjoyed imagining this world.
There is just enough worldbuilding to cause readers to spend more time thinking about the storyworld than the novel does. None of these musings complicating the Ocean’s logic change the basic plot of the novel. The novel’s focus is on the emotional wranglings of one previously-human girl, not the ramifications of a carnivorous Ocean.
Despite all the worldbuilding’s potential for more, the plot’s emphasis is on a romance. Kahlen wants to fall in love, and she most implausibly does in very little time. However, most of the romance of this book stays at the level of pining. Kahlen and Akinli spend very little time together, and more time apart thinking of each other. We are told that they love each other because both are so very different from others, and both understand the other better than anyone else ever has. Most of the actions taken by every character in the book are motivated, however distantly, by Kahlen’s desire to be with Akinli.
Despite being told that the romance is our goal, most of the page count of the book, and the emotional core of the novel, comes from the interplay between Kahlen and the Ocean. Their relationship is a mix of the one between a parent and child and one between a penitent and her god. Either way, the relationship is one with an unequal power imbalance, and the teen must figure out a way to connect with her mother/god in a way that satisfies them both that they are loved enough. To a lesser degree, Kahlen’s relationships with her sister sirens are also important and developed throughout the course of the novel. I would have to go back and check to see how much of the book passes the part of the Bechdel test in which women talk about a subject other than a man, because talking about Akinli or intentionally not talking about Akinli occupy a lot of space in the novel, but these intra-female relationships are the loving core of Kahlen’s life as a siren.
If you don’t mind the ending being spoiled for you in order to discuss the telling of this tale, read below the cut.
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