By Frankie Martinez
If Carrie had a baby with The Little Mermaid, they’d name that baby Chlorine. Equal parts horror and fairy tale, painful and miraculous, hopeful and disturbing, Jade Song’s debut novel tells the story of competitive swimmer Ren Yu and the events that led to her transformation from human girl to mermaid at the age of seventeen.
On first approach, Chlorine feels like a mystery for many reasons. It’s not so unusual in its myriad of genre labels—horror, fairy tale, young adult, coming of age, Asian American, and LGBTQ—but in the way it twists the common tropes found in them. From the first page, we see this most clearly in Chlorine’s enigmatic, self-assured protagonist, Ren.
From the outside, Ren may seem typical. She has loving parents, a successful high school swimming career, a coach who wants to cultivate her talents, and a friend who would do anything for her. Yet, Ren is very unusual. She’s not so concerned with maintaining these parts of her life or even with finding her place in the world like so many young people depicted in typical coming-of-age stories. Rather, she’s known who she was and where she’s belonged since she was four years old—Ren is a mermaid, and she’s desperate to receive her tail and get to the water.
Not only does Ren have otherworldly, mythological desires, but we discover upon reading the first chapter that she has already achieved this transformation. Chlorine is told from the perspective of Ren’s future self, a reflection on her time as a human girl from discovering mermaids in preschool to her transformation and escape into nature.
While I had many questions about the end of Ren’s story from the beginning of the novel, I felt those questions melt away as I became immersed in her story. Within the first few chapters, Ren’s foray into swimming and her first period makes for a memorable beginning—the cruelty of its arrival right before a swim meet, the confusion of putting in a tampon with only her own inexperienced hand to guide it, finally getting it in with the help of an equally inexperienced friend, and having to push through the pain of cramps to perform.
This is not the only instance of physical pain described in this book. Ren tells of both streamlining and breaking her body through rigorous swim training: she suffers a concussion and head trauma that never seems to fully heal, she shakes off a pregnancy scare only to go through the humiliating and dehumanizing experience of an IUD insertion, and so much more. Her retelling of the quiet pain that humans, particularly human girls, endure is much like a car crash—terrible, but impossible to look away from. Song makes it easy to connect with Ren in this way, and we understand her desire to become a mermaid all the more for it when we reach her gratifying and horrifying transformation at the book’s climax.
While Chlorine is mainly a story about Ren’s pain and her escape from it, she is not alone. Her closest friend, Cathy, is often right beside her, not sharing in the same pain but amassing her own. She helps Ren put in a tampon, brings Ren to the hospital for her concussion, and tries to protect Ren from the dangers of entitled boys at swim meet parties. But as much as she wishes to be with Ren, she cannot achieve what Ren achieves, which makes her a sad, often pitiable foil to Ren. Cathy, in her very human state, is Ren’s opposite throughout the book—insecure and unsure, an average swimmer at best, someone who cares about fitting in, and filled with regret, as evidenced by the letters sprinkled throughout the narrative in which she writes to Ren.
Chlorine not only examines what happens to girls who break their bodies for their dreams, but also what happens to those who don’t. An homage to the true horrors of being a girl with the compelling Ren as its avatar, Song’s debut is a disturbing, riveting novel that requires deep lungfuls of air between chapters.
Chlorine is available from Bookshop, Green Bean Books, Laguna Beach Books, Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Third Place Books, and Vroman’s Bookstore.
Frankie Martinez is a writer, reader, and editor from Southern California. Her prose has appeared in 3 Moon Magazine, Poetically Magazine, and The Winnow. She is currently a fiction editor at Miniskirt Magazine and has a slice of life column at The Daily Drunk Mag. Find out more at frankiemilktea.carrd.co.