A classic trait of girlhood—forever confusing your desires with that of an older man’s.

Jade Song’s debut novel, “Chlorine”, is a bit like if you crossed “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang with “The Art of Starving” by Sam J. Miller.

🌿 + 🩻 = 🧜‍♀️

This is YA contemporary fiction about Ren Yu, who has loved mermaids ever since she was a little girl. She took to the water right away herself and now swims competitively on her school’s cutthroat swim team. As one of the school’s top swimmers, she has a parasitic relationship with her touchy-feely, quick-to-anger coach, Jim. She and her teammates follow very specific dietary protocols that vacillate between pasta parties and restricting to snacking on small portions of protein throughout the day. Her father leaves to return to China, she suffers a concussion that threatens her athletic career, and her family expects her to get into an Ivy League school. 🏊‍♀️🥜🥦🤕📑🙇‍♀️👩‍🎓 No pressure, right?

Amidst all this stress from a human life catering to human sensibilities and values, Ren Yu experiences an epiphany: she’s not actually a human after all, but has always been a mermaid herself. She is not afraid to take matters into her own hands in order to complete the transformation for her to transcend to her true form. 🩸🩸🩸

Star athletes had to be delusional enough to think they could withstand physics and gravity enough to fly up onto the first-place podium and shine with the sheer force of athletic ability; there was nothing more bold than a star, after all, visible with the human naked eye despite its death eons ago.

I found this to be a smart novel about the mental gymnastics that can be induced by the pressures and traumas of human adolescence.

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