[BOOK REVIEW] SORROWLAND BY RIVERS SOLOMON

25/8/2021

Sorrowland was a deeply engrossing read that tackles topics relevant today: disability, LGBTQIA rights, sexuality, motherhood, race, history, cults, and religion.

TW/CW: Teen pregnancy, childbirth, animal killings, self-harm, alcohol abuse, cult, gaslighting, pedophilia, blood, death, child death, drowning, rape, attempted forcing of medication, torture, hallucination, brainwash, body horror, non-consensual medical experimentation, and suicide.

Vern, a fifteen-year-old intersex Black girl with albinism, escapes to the woods fleeing the religious compound that she has grown up in called The Blessed Acres of Cain (also known as Cain Land.) Married against her will to the older reverend Sherman and seven months pregnant, Vern seeks freedom from the only home she has ever known. Shortly after entering the woods, Vern goes into labor giving birth to twin baby boys, Howling and Feral, while also being pursued by an entity called The Fiend who is employed by those at Cain Land.

Living in the woods, Vern, and Feral all flourish in their environment. The boys are precocious and adapt to new situations quickly. Still being hunted by the fiend after all the years, Vern never feels that she and her tiny sons are entirely safe in their forest home. Her body begins to change in frightening ways, leading her to take the boys and seek help from the outside world.

And her newfound family of Gogo and Bridget, Vern, and her children all thrive and flourish. Vern is free to test the limits imposed by the new changes to her body, while she and the boys are being cared for. Despite believing that she has long defeated The Fiend, Vern learns that Cain Land will not give up pursuing her and seeking to bring her back to their cult by any means necessary.

Sorrowland was a deeply engrossing read that tackles topics relevant today: disability, LGBTQIA rights, sexuality, motherhood, race, history, cults, and religion.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, however, the end of the book did feel like it was rushing toward a conclusion that does not feel like it fits the rest of the story. That being said, it is one of my top reads of 2021.

4/5 Stars
Thank you to #NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for providing me with a review copy of this novel. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Sorrowland
by Rivers Solomon

'A fantastical, fierce reckoning ... Sorrowland is gorgeous, and the writing, the storytelling, are magnificent. This country has a dark history of what it's willing to do to black bodies, and Rivers Solomon lays that truth bare in a most unexpected, absolutely brilliant way.' ROXANE GAY

Chosen as a 'Book of the Month' in the Guardian
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A triumphant, genre-bending novel, following a y oung woman through a nightmarish yet recognisable landscape as she attempts to create a new life for herself and her children.

Vern, a hunted woman alone in the woods, gives birth to twins and raises them away from the influence of the outside world. But something is wrong - not with them, but with her own body. It's changing, it's stronger, it's not normal.

To understand her body's metamorphosis, Vern must investigate the secluded religious compound from which she fled and the violent history of dehumanisation, medical experimentation and genocide that produced it. In the course of reclaiming her own darkness, Vern learns that monsters aren't just individuals, but entire histories, systems and nations.

Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland is a memorable work of Gothic fiction that wrestles with the tangled history of racism in America and the marginalisation of society's undesirables. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

Brandi Guarino

Brandi Guarino is a voracious reader and has a To Be Read list that never ends. She is passionate and committed to championing the work of independent writers and publishers in horror, science fiction, and fantasy. She is on Twitter at @bgbibliophile and Instagram at www.instagram.com/brandi_the_bibliophile.