Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
I would like to thank Merky Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Merky Books
Published – Out Now
Price – £14.99 hardback £9.99 Kindle eBook
A triumphant, genre-bending novel, following a young 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.
For me one of the joys of reading is finding a character who initially you don’t understand but then you start to understand their worldview and how that has been shaped by the world they lived in. We all get shaped by the environment and this history of that environment which influences our choices. In Rivers Solomon’s excellent new novel Sorrowland we meet a character who very much decides that from now on they will take the world on their own terms from now on; someone who has to learn how to be who they really are and stand up to the past that still wants to have its claws in them and their family.
The story centres on Vern who we first meet fleeing someone known as The Fiend while heavily pregnant. We witness her giving birth alone to twins she names Howl and Feral. Vern stays in the forest for a few years living off the land and we see she has started to demonstrate extraordinary strength and healing powers. Vern is trying to avoid being caught and sent back to Cainland a commune formed over the 1950s and 60s as part of the Black civil rights movement but ran by a sinister reverend with strict rules and strange practises. Vern as a teenager was selected to become the commune’s new leader’s wide and is bearing his children. Vern forms a relationship with a woman named Ollie but ultimately it becomes apparent the forest cannot be her home. Her best friend Lucy ran away and was never heard of since and Vern decides to try and follow her friend’s trail. Vern and her children start travelling across the US; following clues, stealing and avoiding authority while Vern’s body continues to change; haunted by ghosts and again pursued by the Fiend and the people who run Cainland who all want Vern for their own ends.
I loved this story so much as from that startling opening scene we get plunged into not just Vern’s life but the history of Cainland and in reality of the United States that shaped her. Vern a sarcastic, spiky teenage black woman with albinism feels very much at the start someone so different to what we tend to think of as the hero of the novel. Why would someone still want to live in the forest after escaping but we see in a series of flashbacks exactly the life Vern was plunged into. Where corrupt authorities would always send people who escape back; where rebellious people got even more extreme punishments as well as cults that make families agree to their 14 year old daughter to be married to a much older man. In reality we then see Vern is mother very much focused on ensuring her children and herself don’t ever come under that’s area’s power again. When she realises eventually that the forests are not safe, she moves across the US to find Lucy. At which point as the reader we are cheering her steal and lie to evade the police and the Fiend; we now understand why Vern needs to be safe. It’s a beautiful piece of character development that we come to understand Vern and now start to know how and why they will react to a particular situation.
In the later half of the book Vern while looking for Lucy starts to settle in a safer place and forms new relationships with Lucy’s own friends. In particular Gogo an activist who helps treat those injured in protests and studies science. Initially Gogo is just fascinated by Vern’s powers of recovery and the bodily changes she is going through but the two form an emotional bond and here we see Vern’s attraction to women has been previously branded as sinful and wicked and Vern is struggling to get past that and her previous experiences when those feelings emerged. A book that is often brutal, sharp edged has amazing moments of tenderness be that Gogo reading Vern the work of Ursula Le Guin; Howl and Feral’s absolutely brilliant way of playing, learning and taking on the world even at such a young age (I loved how quickly these children became characters in their own right as Vern herself realises her children are no longer babies but now individuals to take on their own terms) and Vern finally deciding to tackle their issues with reading caused by a severe eye issue. This adds to the complexity of Vern making her a truly three-dimensional character rarely doing what they are told but also learning that they can work with others they respect and be open about their feelings. All of which help the reader really pull for Vern and her family as the story once again picks up the pace as Cainland returns to take Vern back.
This is where the title Sorrowland really helps explore the wider plot. Cainland and it’s formation plus it’s fixation on Vern and her new abilities is actually exploring the history of white nationalism taking advantage of Black communities from infiltration by spies to secretive medical experiments -all of which are factual and well documented. Cainland was supposed to be founded as a community to tackle the long-term injustices following slavery and racism in the 19th and 20th centuries but we see there are other groups pulling the strings that Vern’s former husband ultimately answer to. A community for whom special medicines are taken every day and people need to be strapped in at night due to ‘night terrors’. Solomon poses the reader to ask is the US ever really going to stop interfering and trying to use such communities for its own ends. While this makes for a tense and action-packed finale as Vern tries to tackle Cainland and get her own freedom it also poses questions on how can this cycle of control be broken. Vern in her ability to say ‘no I want to live the way I want to’ becomes not simply a rebel but someone able to face the ghosts of her past as well as those of the community and country she lives in and aim to walk away freed from those barriers to walk her own path.
Sorrowland is a hugely impressive piece of storytelling where the interaction between Vern and the world they inhabit makes the reader examine much wider issues of how we are shaped by our past and how can we get away from it unscathed. Themes of racism, sexual abuse and homophobia are tackled and never gratuitously. By the end of the tale Vern becomes one of my favourite characters this year in one of the best books I’ve read. Strongly recommended.
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