Song, J: Chlorine 'Entrances even as it unsettles' - Buzzfeed

This book is so incredibly haunting. I will never be able to see mermaids the same way again. And who would have thought that I would be obsessed with mermaids again as an adult. In Chlorine we follow a young girl that wants nothing in life more than to become a mermaid and this story is her metamorphosis into becoming one. It is her descent into madness. The story has a beautiful build up, the writing is good and you could practically smell the chlorine from the swimming pool while reading. It is a story where you don't quite know what is going on at times because the narrator is unreliable and fooling not only herself but also the reader. Chlorine is a novel that is perfect for everyone that loves a bit of unreliability in their narrator and quite a bit of insanity.

Chlorine is horror in its purest form or rather, a deep exploration of how far horror can go. Jade Song delves into the dark side of competitive swimming, adolescence and pressures from all the sides. Blending racism and misogyny with a slow, chilling descent into madness. The story is tense and suffused with dread. As a reader you know something is coming, but not when, how or why. The book also serves as a bitterly honest portrait of growing up as a girl in a patriarchal society, in a culture that fetishizes women’s bodies. Song handles this with raw realism rather than pure shock value, making it gut-wrenching and profoundly haunting. This isn’t a book for new horror readers! Chlorine is intense! It’s perfect for anyone ready to confront darkness that feels all too real. But even for me, some chapters and scenarios were almost too much to handle. All in all, Jade Song is an author to watch, and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for their future work.

Chlorine“ ist ein Coming-of-Age-Roman, roh und intensiv. Er spricht klug über Körper, Druck und Selbstfindung, mit starken Bildern für innere Zerrissenheit. Leider verliert er sich aber etwas im Warten auf die am Anfang versprochenen Meerfrauen-Thematik. Das bleibt dann doch eher Metapher als Magie.

It wasn't bad. It's naive and childish, but only cause it's about teenagers. But all characters were written really good, u believe in these pubertal children. If u hate body liquids, or anything near blood and genitalic, it's not for u. It was a little bit boring till the middle of the book. And culmination wasn't bad. I liked the ending. Will i reread it? No. But it wasn't bad.

I was excited to read this, but I had to DNF it after 100 pages. Disgusting and uncomfortable pages about the smell of someones poop and a child forcing their friend to insert a tampon in them... It reads like a melodramatic teenagers diary. The number of times I rolled my eyes at how deep it tries to be should have caused them to be permanently stuck in that position. The main character is also insufferable.