What a great debut!! It’s the kind of story that leaves you gradually unsettled instead of scared from the beginning. Ren’s characterization and arc uses not just body horror, but girlhood as horror, and for “Chlorine”s premise being so strange, she felt so real as a character. I don’t really know how else to explain the “girlhood as horror” description, except for the author(Jade Song!) captured the pain, community, and scrutiny in growing up as a teenage girl. And Ren definitely grew into herself—something a little more than a woman, and less human than one—through a gory and nontraditional (self-imposed) transformation. Which will be interpreted differently depending on the reader: like some other literary horror novels, the fantastical can blur the lines between metaphor and something literally happening.

And the sapphic longing with her and Cathy!! Cathy had her shortcomings, but the ending pulled on my heart.

I also loved the way mental health was written about! Ren’s insistence on being perfect. Her craving for acceptance from her parents. Her gradual numbness and tiredness, how that showed in her internal monologues as a direct result of all of the pressure and abuse she’d endured. How swimming helped her grow into her mermaid self, although she started looking at certain parts of it differently the less she thought of herself as human. The writing was immersive, too, I felt like I was put directly into the obsessiveness of her mind and thoughts. I recommend looking at some of the trigger warnings before you read this if you’re sensitive to that kind of subject matter, but this was one of the more realistic traumatized characters I’ve read about.

I definitely think I’ll want to see where Jade Song goes as an author!