and rather than seeing those scenes, which would have sold Vern's feelings for these characters, they serve mostly as references so that we know why Vern now has a particular skill, or why the children have had a leap in their progress. Solomon tells us about scenes between Gogo and Vern, or Vern and her children.

There's a version of this flaw in the plot as well.

And then fae'd drop the subject for ten or even twenty chapters, and I'd accept I read too deeply - only for it to pop back up later, written as one character revealing the truth to another. I'd read a line and wonder if Solomon was telling us a character secret or using a colloquial turn of phrase for a specific story reason. The other word that Solomon dances around, in a paragraph worth of words? The racial slur described as 'sounding like trigger.' Structurally, this informs how you read which words/labels are claimed and which aren't, and as a fellow Black, genderqueer writer, I felt this was one of faer most painful rhetorical decisions.Ī frequent lack of clarity compounded this problem. (To Solomon's credit, much of this is implied, although there are sex scenes when she is 17 and still very much traumatized). Since she is an escaped child bride, there is a large amount of character development surrounding childhood sexual trauma. I quote the back matter because that's where the first problem with Sorrowland arises: Vern is never a woman she is a child. government, a physical, fungal transformation caused by the very past she's running from. She gives birth to the twins Howling and Feral, fathered by the current cult leader what follows is Vern's metamorphosis as she is chased by people connected to the cult and the U.S. The novel's focal point is Vern, described by back matter as 'a hunted woman.' She is on the run after escaping from a Black separatist cult. I'm a fan of Solomon's work faer The Deep, alongside the band clipping., and An Unkindness of Ghosts are painful, beautifully composed reads. I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to podcasts about cults. I dove into Sorrowland ready to be enraptured by it.

However, an overreliance on atmospherics at the expense of basic building blocks weakens the overall story and themes. Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland tells a tale of how the horrors inflicted upon Black Americans warp and change us.

Rivers solomon sorrowland