The Sirens: A Novel

A spellbinding novel about sisters separated by centuries, but bound together by the sea, from the author of the runaway New York Times bestseller Weyward

2019:
Lucy awakens from a dream to find her hands around her ex-lover’s throat. Horrified, she flees to her older sister’s house on the Australian coast, hoping she can help explain the strangely vivid nightmare that preceded the attack—but Jess is nowhere to be found.

As Lucy awaits her return, the rumors surrounding Jess’s strange small town start to emerge. Numerous men have gone missing at sea, spread over decades. A tiny baby was found hidden in a cave. And sailors tell of hearing women’s voices on the waves. Desperate for answers, Lucy finds and begins to read her sister’s adolescent diary.

1999: Jess is a lonely sixteen-year-old in a rural town in the middle of the continent. Diagnosed with a rare allergy to water, she has always felt different, until her young, charming art teacher takes an interest in her drawings, seeing a power and maturity in them—and in her—that no one else has.

1800: Twin sisters Mary and Eliza have been torn from their loving father in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship bound for Australia. For their entire lives, they’ve feared the ocean, as their mother tragically drowned when they were just girls. Yet as the boat bears them further and further from all they know, they begin to notice changes in their bodies that they can’t explain, and they feel the sea beginning to call to them…

A breathtaking tale of female resilience and the bonds of sisterhood across time and space, The Sirens captures the power of dreams, and the mystery and magic of the sea.

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352 pages

Average rating: 5.5

4 RATINGS

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2 REVIEWS

Community Reviews

Anonymous
Feb 21, 2025
2/10 stars
First, a huge thank you to the publisher and to Netgalley for supplying me with this audiobook in exchange for an honest review. After loving Weyward, I was so excited to read this book, but in all honesty, it fell flat for me from the beginning all the way to the end. If I hadn’t been given the book to review, I probably wouldn’t have finished it. A quote from the beginning of the book really shows the overwrought and stilted style that ruined Lucy as a narrator for me: “I felt like a religious zealot having a crisis of faith. What use is a weapon people are unafraid to touch?” In this line, she is talking about the truth of what happened to her, but it just seems so off the mark for the context that it completely pulls you out of the narrative. In addition, the primary device used for getting the plot going, sleepwalking, completely gets ignored throughout the end of the book and doesn’t allow the reader to fully understand how that played into the larger narrative. As a whole, I found the character to fall flat and think that the author missed a huge opportunity to reclaim the trope of a siren in a way that she just didn’t. A lost opportunity in my opinion.
lexsea
Oct 12, 2024
7/10 stars
If H2O: Just Add Water was darker, the MCs dealt with traumatic experiences and it was made into a book. The Sirens is an enchanting story that blends magical realism, historical fiction and mystery while delving into real life themes like generational trauma, sisterhood & motherhood, self-discovery, to name a few. The descriptions of the environments are alive and eerie and the mystery is riveting. As someone who loved pretending to be a mermaid for probably too long as a kid, this was the perfect way to spark my interest again. Immediately after reading I had to dive into hours-long mermaid research and Irish folklore on merrows for fuller immersion. I was left with the feeling that the initial conflict was kind of forgotten about, but the epilogue makes up for it though!

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