But what she finds isn’t exactly what she expects. When she escapes to the surface, she is trying to figure out who she is as an individual without all of her responsibilities and memories weighing her down. She feels as though she doesn’t have any identity outside of being the historian. Yetu is suffering under the weight of these memories, many of which are painful, although some of them are happy. She was designated so at age 14, but is anxious and has a finicky temperament. Yetu is the major character in the story, and we learn that she is the historian for her people. The book included a conversation about how mating worked among the wajinru that wasn’t awkward.
I’d actually like to see this in more books. I found that to be interesting, since this is not something I have come across in any books before, and think it is important to see, as this is more inclusive of people who identify as non-binary or gender nonconforming.
I noticed that while certain characters are referred to specifically as male or female, other characters are not referred to by a specific gender. In addition, they have the ability to communicate in a sort of telepathic way, using electroreceptors to share memories with each other. They had fins, scales, webbing between their fingers, gills, tail fins rather than two legs, and the ability to sense sound and motion through their scales, similar to lateral lines in fish. The wajinru remind me strongly of a type of mermaid (as you can see in the cover picture), and there were so many aspects that showed that they were well adapted to underwater life. This book is a perfect example of showing rather than telling. The world building in the book is incredibly detailed, and I love how information is presented. In order to survive, she and her people will have to reclaim the memories, their identities, and own who they really are. She learns about her own past, and the future of her people. In doing so, she not only learns about herself, but also about the world her people left behind many centuries ago. She flees to the surface to escape the memories, expectations, and responsibilities. Yetu, however, isn’t strong enough to handle the memories, and she is being destroyed by the weight of the history. Their past is too traumatic to be remembered by all, so they forget them, entrusting only the historian with their memories.
While the women drowned, their offspring lived … and thrived in a sort of utopian society in the deep part of the ocean. The wajinru are the water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African women thrown from slave ships when they were in labor.
She alone holds the painful memories of their past, sharing them psychically for everyone to experience once a year in a ceremony called the Remembrance. Yetu is the historian for her people, the wajinru.
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