The Sirens is a two timeline story. One is set in 1800 with two sisters, Eliza and Mary, banished to Australia from England and carried there on the Naiad, a ship that sinks off the Australian shore with the loss of one hundred lives. The other timeline is contemporary, occurring in 2019 and involving two sisters, Lucy (a journalism student) and Jess (an artist), who share dreams of Eliza and Mary, an obsession with water, and a bizarre disfiguring skin condition, aquagenic urticaria, in which their skin reacts to contact with water, causing hives.
After Lucy begins having these dreams, she awakes up one night in her ex-lover’s college dorm room, strangling him in a sleep-walking episode. To escape the uproar caused by his sharing of a nude picture of her revealing her skin condition as well as her attempt to choke him, she drives to her sister’s house in the town of Comber Bay where she discovers that her sister has vanished only days from a major art exhibition. Comber’s Bay has a long history of bizarre happenings, including the wreck of the ship carrying Eliza and Mary to Australia and the disappearance of eight men over the course of several decades. To kill time while her sister shows up, Lucy starts researching the men and trying to find a link to their disappearances.
This book is dark and eerie with threads of Irish folk lore and magical realism. The sirens here have a rather feminist attitude unlike in Greek mythology. I read this because I enjoyed Hart’s Weyward, but did not enjoy this one as much. I found it dragged at times and also that neither Jess nor Lucy were particularly likable characters. Hart does do a good job in showing women’s strength when subjected to the tyrannical whims of her male characters.
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The Sirens (Harper Collins, October 10, 2024) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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You can read my review of Weyward here.
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