Songs from the Deep

by Kelly Powell

A girl searches for a killer on an island where deadly sirens lurk just beneath the waves in this gripping, atmospheric debut novel.

The sea holds many secrets.

Moira Alexander has always been fascinated by the deadly sirens who lurk along the shores of her island town. Even though their haunting songs can lure anyone to a swift and watery grave, she gets as close to them as she can, playing her violin on the edge of the enchanted sea. When a young boy is found dead on the beach, the islanders assume that he's one of the sirens' victims. Moira isn't so sure.

Certain that someone has framed the boy's death as a siren attack, Moira convinces her childhood friend, the lighthouse keeper Jude Osric, to help her find the real killer, rekindling their friendship in the process. With townspeople itching to hunt the sirens down, and their own secrets threatening to unravel their fragile new alliance, Moira and Jude must race against time to stop the killer before it's too late-for humans and sirens alike.

• ISBN10: 1534438076
• ISBN13: 9781534438071
• Publish Date: 5 November 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Imprint: Margaret K McElderry Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[Witty and Sarcastic Bookclub]

Have you ever found a book nestled on your shelf, almost hiding, that you have no memory of acquiring? This recently happened with Songs from the Deep by Kelly Powell. I was looking for a palate cleanser after reading a heavy (but extremely good) book.

The book follows Moira, who lives in a quiet little island town that also happens to be the gathering place of sirens. Everyone knows they’re dangerous, and have been known to kill people, but Moira has a fascination with them.

When a boy is found mangled and dead, and the sirens blamed, Moira is suspicious and thinks that maybe they are not to blame. She and her childhood friend, Jude, decide to try to find and stop a killer- if there is one.

There were some things about Songs from the Deep that didn’t quite work for me, but there were also some things that I thought were well done. First of all, the inclusion of sirens in a book is always intriguing, and I enjoyed seeing how they were portrayed here. Ostensibly about whether they were involved in the murder or not, they were nonetheless not the main focus of the plot. I really liked that they were a backdrop surrounding the characters of Moira and Jude. I also enjoyed the combination of the fantastical with the ordinary. It reminded me of Twin Peaks in that the bizarre butted right up against the everyday, and everyone was just sort of fine with it. Although, this has nothing on Twin Peaks’ bizarre-o-meter.

While I liked that the sirens were a background to the relationships between the characters, I struggled to buy that relationship. Everything felt a little jilted and rushed to me. Even at the beginning, when Moira has a bitter assumption about her mom not caring, I couldn’t understand why she would think that. And the way a “secret” was hinted at from the beginning, instead of piquing my interest, just annoyed me. I felt like the mentions of it every couple of pages (toward the beginning) were rather shoehorned in. I think these issues were all just a product of Songs from the Deep being Powell’s debut novel.

It is clear that she is a talented writer, and I am sure that both the pacing and how things are revealed will become less of an issue in subsequent books. At the end of the day, Songs from the Deep wasn’t for me, but will be enjoyed by many people.

[layawaydragon]

Read for free on RivetedLit.com Dec 17th. I made it 143 pages.

At first, I was loving the atmosphere and writing. But dear lord, is it slooooooooow! It was too dull and long to continue. I think this would've worked as a novella or short story. There just wasn't enough tension or urgency to keep me reading. Not even two dead sirens helped! I swear I yawned so much, I thought it would put me to sleep.

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

Source: ARC from Bookcon

I was tempted to DNF Songs from the Deep for a large portion of the book, and in fact only finished reading it because it was still in my bag at a point in time I needed something to read and have nothing else with me. The book is, frankly, nothing exemplary, and from the prose to the characters to the general plot sounded exactly like dozens of mid-list YA novels I might have pulled off the shelf in 2012. In a YA market that is so robust and has recently released incredible books like Six of Crows and Stepsister and Echo North, Songs from the Deep is surprisingly generic.

The book starts out predictably: a girl whose father has died and who has a distant relationship with her mother rekindles her friendship with the handsome lighthouse keeper, whose parents are, of course, also dead. The two used to be friends but are no longer (for reasons the protagonist/character refuse to reveal in a poor attempt to maintain some suspense), but they are thrown together by a mysterious death. The town blames sirens. The protagonist, of course, loves sirens, is the daughter of a local expert on sirens, and sees the beauty in these dangerous creatures when few others do. She knows the sirens didn’t do it.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but so many of the big picture plot pieces and the details are simply not new elements in YA. The book’s only grip on me was, once I had made it about 50% of the way through the book, I sort of wanted to finish to wrap up the mystery of the murdered. The problem is: I had predicted the murderer from the start, and I ended up being right. There’s foreshadowing and clues and there’s just…a very obvious mystery.


The book also suffers from lack of logic, one of my biggest pet peeves. I don’t expect characters to act 100% rationally 100% of the time, but I can’t stand when they do obviously stupid things that I can’t imagine making sense to anyone…and the author/narrative voice gives the sense that it’s normal and they’re not behaving illogically at all. My biggest example of this would be a spoiler for the book, but overall it’s surprising that the main characters themselves weren’t murdered for the way they handled their amateur investigation.

Sirens are cool. Stories in small towns by the sea always have a niche audience. I just didn’t enjoy this one at all.