THE SIREN

An Ivy League student pledges a group with a cultlike aura.

Emery Coleman, an 18-year-old Black girl from Detroit, is attending Dartmouth on a scholarship—the first member of her family to enter higher education. Emery should be celebrating, but she carries a heavy secret: She spent time in a psychiatric ward after hearing voices and attacking her mother. Now, Emery regularly sees a therapist and takes medication, but she feels irreparably broken. How can her mother not see that her only daughter is a monster? When she meets five otherworldly girls known as The Sirens—Roux, Harper, Artie, Aurora, and Sora—Emery feels like she’s been put under a spell. Unlike the campus sororities and clubs, the highly exclusive Sirens and their rituals are shrouded in mystery and unsettling rumors. When Emery is invited to be one of four new Siren pledges, she accepts, only to realize that the relief of belonging comes at a high price. Adeyemi’s contemporary stand-alone novel is an exemplary model of harmony between vibrant storytelling and rich character development. Emery is a sensitive, nuanced, and sympathetically flawed protagonist whose guilt and shame guide her actions and self-image. She feels—and loves—deeply. Adeyemi doesn’t romanticize mental illness, instead perceptively emphasizing Emery’s sense of isolation and disconnection and portraying her relationships with considerable emotional depth.

A forceful, strikingly poetic narrative that looks trauma, grief, and death in the face without flinching.