Weyward was one of my favorite reads last year so I was excited when I saw that Emilia Hart had a new novel releasing this year. It’s always hard, though, to follow up a hugely successful novel because of the expectations it creates.
I know it’s about the journey, not the destination, and as someone that reads a lot, I can often foresee where certain plot points might go. In fact, I think Emilia Hart expects that her readers see exactly how some things are going to come together and that we aren’t supposed to view some of the plot developments as surprises or twists. But when it takes the main character (because while this novel might be about four characters and have chapters from three points of view, Lucy is the primary voice) until almost the end to get on the same page with the reader, it does kind of feel like a lost opportunity. I don’t need to be surprised but I want the solution to be more than the thing I guessed was coming a few chapters in (and that’s only because I didn’t want to commit to expecting the obvious).
One thing that worked so well in Weyward is that for most of the novel, it’s not obvious whether there is a magical explanation or if the women just all happen to be very into nature and animals. With The Sirens, I don’t think it was quite as balanced and I expected the magical explanation from the beginning even if we didn’t get to fully explore what it meant till much later. I also think Weyward did a better job of balancing the three points of view and giving each woman her own, if parallel, journey. While Lucy is the main point of view, her journey of self-discovery just didn’t feel as strong as any of the women in Weyward. I enjoyed her researching about the town’s past and its history of mysterious drowning of questionable men, but I wanted more from both her and Jesse’s stories than “I’m embracing my power and understand my past.” Mary and Eliza offered an interesting glimpse into history as they were being transported to Australia, a penal colony, along with the other women for crimes they had committed, and on top of that, they were Irish, so there was that extra dimension of being victims of English colonization.
I think the challenge is that in all three of these story lines, the main driver is that the women are on a journey of discovery, finding out their true heritage as the story progressed, but beyond that, there wasn’t as much to their story. Weyward, in comparison, had more specific plot lines for each woman (in jail for witchcraft and murder; leaving an abusive marriage) that were interesting in their own right while also leading the woman to a better understanding of herself. For Lucy, she sleepwalks and wakes to find herself strangling a boy that wronged her, leading her to flee to her sister’s. The action is a catalyst for her journey and her research but doesn’t seem relevant to the story beyond that (yes, she gets suspended from school etc). Basically, if just one of the three points of view had had a stronger plot on its own, I think it would have been enough to balance the other twi being written as they are but with all three this way, it was just missing something.
Is it unfair to compare it to the previous novel? Sure and I didn’t need it to be a copy of Weyward but it seemed the easiest way to try explain why this one didn’t work for me as well. I wonder how I would feel if I hadn’t read Weyward first but I think it would be similar – a decent, if predictable novel that ultimately doesn’t stand out.