As a huge fan of the experimental rap trio clipping., I always thought that their 3-track EP The Deep was an overlooked project in their discography. When I found out that there was a whole novel to flesh out that exact concept, I was very interested.

The setup about mermaid descendants from African women that were thrown overboard from slave ships is immediately intriguing and the story deals a lot with what it means to grapple with the difficult history of a people.
The mystical traditions of this mermaid people, the wajinru, work very well as metaphor to explore the importance of history and the burden of memory, but also generational trauma and the power of community. Solomon manages to build up a good atmosphere around this unique setting and puts together a couple of very interesting characters.

The afterword written by clipping. themselves also adds some nice words about how this story was created and morphed from storyteller to storyteller, which adds a bit of another layer to it.