May 7

May 7 Sorrowland

Author: Rivers Solomon
Publisher: MCD
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Vern — seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised — flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future — outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

TL;DR Review

Sorrowland is a brutal, impressive novel that’s hard to look away from. Slow-paced but engrossing, this is cultural and historical commentary through science fiction at its finest.

For you if: You’re interested in reading excellently written, Black, queer, gothic fiction.

Full Review

“They’d done the calculations as small children. Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.”

When I saw that Rivers Solomon, author of The Deep, had a new book coming out, I didn’t ask questions — I just picked it up. And it’s probably best that I didn’t read too much about it beforehand, because a lot of people have put it in the “horror” category, and horror and I don’t mix. Fortunately, though, this is a bit of a genre defier, and I personally wouldn’t call it horror — more like gothic science fiction; somewhat grotesque but not so much that it can’t be stomached. Anyway, I’m really glad that I read it, because wow is it impressive.

It’s hard to summarize Sorrowland without giving too much away, but in short, it’s about a young woman named Vern who flees a cultish compound. In the first chapter, she gives birth to twins in the woods. The book follows her journey over the next few years as she raises her children, does her best to stay free, begins to transform in strange ways, and learns more about the place she came from.

The pace of the novel is sort of slow, but it still really draws you in — you can’t look away. And there’s so much going on here, all of which is radically and excellently done. Primarily, it underscores the historical mistreatment, experimentation, and use of Black bodies by the US government, but there’s also a lot in here about queerness, and both gender and biological sex; about radical self acceptance; about the complicated nature of how community and abuse intersect; about motherhood; about shared history.

This one solidified Rivers Solomon as an auto-read author for me. They are just so good.