This novel vividly portrays how Black bodies have been used for unethical experiments while it also celebrates queer love, motherhood, and vengeance. “ Sorrowland is a powerful story about motherhood, survival, and the cruel treatment of Black bodies.” -Taiwo Balogun, Marie Claire “If you’ve read Rivers Solomon’s previous work, you’ll be familiar with their fearless explorations of transformation, identity, oppression and power, and Sorrowland continues this investigation with fantastic, terrifying sci-fi brilliance.” -Karla Strand, Ms. “ Sorrowland is a fully engrossing story that fully embraces its characters and beautifully engages with their lived experiences of gender, queerness, disability, racialization, power and corruption, and relationship with the land.” -Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

' Sorrowland a gothic techno-thriller in which the trauma of the past is parried with defiance and a thirst for understanding, as embodied by an electrifying young hero.' -Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian “ Sorrowland is a tremendous, riveting work, sinking long, deep roots into the nightmare soil of American history in order to grow and feed something new.” -Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times Book Review This is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

Here, monsters aren’t just individuals but entire nations. Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of gothic fiction. Finding the truth will mean uncovering not only the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history of America that produced it. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past and, more troublingly, the future-outside the woods. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. There, she gives birth to twins and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.īut even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Vern-seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised-flees for the shelter of the woods.

Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more!Ī triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction. A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2021

Sorrowland book review