Chlorine: A Novel
In the vein of The Pisces and The Vegetarian, Chlorine is a debut novel that blurs the line between a literary coming-of-age narrative and a dark unsettling horror tale, told from an adult perspective on the trials and tribulations of growing up in a society that puts pressure on young women and their bodies… a powerful, relevant novel of immigration, sapphic longing, and fierce, defiant becoming.
Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach is her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life.
But these are human concerns. These are the concerns of those confined to land, those with legs. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Creatures that called sailors to their doom. That dragged them down and drowned them. That feasted on their flesh. The creature that she’s always longed to become: the mermaid.
Ren aches to be in the water. She dreams of the scent of chlorine, the feel of it on her skin. And she will do anything she can to make a life for herself where she can be free. No matter the pain. No matter what anyone else thinks. No matter how much blood she has to spill.
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Community Reviews
Pretentious, unbelievable, contradictory and repetitive. Didn't like Ren. Inner dialogue made her unlikable and deluded.
Some passages read like Lemony Snicket.
This didn't feel like a book, but an amateurish first draft that was trying too hard.
By the middle to the end, I picked up on the pattern of exposition dumps and convenient mermaid mythos to gaslit me into believing Ren's actions made sense.
The Cathy chapters proved useless when Ren would essentially say the same thing before or afterwards.
Flowery prose directed at a character who never once earned it, was a choice, and not a good one.
Why were the Cathy chapters included? Ren was so callous and ungrateful to Cathy for saving her (twice) that she can't even bother to have dinner with her. The narrator didn't care about Cathy. Why should I?
The simultaneous reverence and disdain for coach Jim was scattered and unfounded. Near the end, I stopped thinking coach Jim was a predator and began thinking Ren was lying.
Now knowing the author was a competitive swimmer, I'm wondering if she is writing of a dynamic she never experienced or one she is still pained to revisit. Either way, I first wondered if the author had athletic experience based on the disconnect and mechanical way in which she approached writing about the sport. I only knew she cared about swimming because she wouldn't stop mentioning it. In the scenes she displayed her prowess, she was either a bad listener, disqualified or rushed to the hospital. I think her victory was recounted once? Every other time, we were meant to take her talent for granted as Ren did. However I wanted to feel the importance of swimming and winning. There were threats and hypotheticals posed but no scenes in which we were meant to fear Coach Jim as we were told (ad nauseum) to.
With how many times Ren mentioned chair throwing, I wished there was a scene where I knew who Jim was instead of being told who he was from an unlikeable narrator with a concussion.
Treated SA flippantly to the point of disrespect.
The hospital scene was a joke. Ren should have been committed. Wasn't she still a minor? Isn't this an act of SH?
I'm not going to suspend disbelief when we're in the full reality that she cleaved her legs in the shower and potato-sack-hopped out to the swim meet as if it was normal.
This would have been good as an ambiguous short story that fully embraced the magical realism. A good portion of this book should have been refined or eliminated.
if you give me a “coming of age” horror story full of yearning and obsession, i will read it and eat it up every single time
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