Anyone who didn’t read A Song Below Water last year missed a trick, and I would also like to report that I, while reading it, missed a trick. The heroine of A Song Below Water is a siren, though she dedicates a lot of energy to hiding this fact about herself. While the world is friendly to some types of magic–particularly the charming and melodical eloko, of which Tavia’s school’s resident mean girl Naema is one–they’re acutely hostile to sirens. It is no coincidence that only Black girls and women can be sirens.
A Chorus Rises is a companion novel in the best, best way. It opens not long after the climactic events in A Chorus Rises, focusing on mean girl Naema and her lasting trauma over having been turned to stone by Tavia’s sister Effie, a gorgon. In the aftermath of the events of A Song Below Water, it’s suddenly become fashionable to be a siren. Whereas in the olden days, Naema was part of a magical network that protected the secrecy of sirens’ identities (including Tavia’s), now she’s kind of an outcast. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that Naema threatened Tavia’s secrecy. Naema’s been uninvited from the network of protectors. Even her friends are talking about Tavia’s strength and bravery, telling and retelling the story of how Tavia’s song saved all the children in Portland who had been frozen in stone.
There’s just one piece of the story that’s being left out: Naema’s story. Yes, Tavia’s song saved her and the other kids from being stone. Yes, she threatened Tavia and Effie (after years of protecting Tavia, a schoolmate she personally couldn’t stand). But in between those two events, Tavia turned her to stone. Every time Naema sees the positive press on Tavia, the movie that’s made about what happened in those days, it’s her attacker she’s seeing praised. But Naema sees more than that. She sees how eager the culture is to set the two of them, Tavia and Naema, against each other–not for who they are, two girls who don’t get along, but for what they represent: two Black girls, both magic, one good, one bad, because the culture doesn’t have enough love to give two different Black girls, which means of course that they never loved either of them in the first place.
I loved Naema’s ferocious self-assurance, and I love that she spends most of this book refusing to yield space even when the culture demands that she yield it. She understands the space she has occupied all her life, and she understands the space she’s entitled to occupy now. As much as this is a book about finding a place (in her family, especially, which is a gorgeous theme of the book and made me very emoshe as a person with a lot of cousins), it’s also a story about recovering from trauma. Being turned into stone was awful and terrifying, and Naema is mad as hell about it. She demands to be allowed the space to have been the person who experienced that trauma, the person who was victimized in Tavia and Effie’s journey, and the person who survived it.
Whereas A Song Below Water is a story about Tavia finding her voice, A Chorus Rises tells the story of Naema learning to listen. She is wrapped up in one central question throughout this book, a question nobody seems able to answer. What does it mean to be eloko? If she is special, if she is magic, then what makes her that way? What kinship does she have with the other eloko? (Does she have a kinship with them?) Naema doesn’t just have to learn to listen, but to whom. Because her confidence in herself has always been merited and rewarded, she’s gotten really good at tuning out the voices and opinions of other people. Now she has to learn to tune in, to hear the voices of those who have come before her, and to understand her true place in the world.
In my review of A Song Below Water, I mildly complained that Morrow didn’t give enough consideration to the full humanity of Mean Girl Naema. Turns out, she was only biding her time for this book. The simple story–and the one that Tavia believes to be true in her book–is that Naema is just an asshole, and Tavia’s a good girl trying her best. But what both of them realize in A Chorus Rises is that the story that’s simple when it’s just about two girls in school becomes toxic when it’s fed out to the rest of the world. The rest of the world has a different stake in setting two Black girls in opposition to each other, and the best thing about Naema is how clearly she understands this, and how adamantly she refuses to play into it. I loved her and I loved this book.
When I said at the start of this post that A Chorus Rises is a companion novel in the best way, this is what I mean: It’s not doing the work of a sequel, where you have to keep reading if you want more of Tavia’s story. It truly is Naema’s story, different in scope and stakes as well as point of view. But what it does do is expand the world in fascinating ways, giving the reader a new way to understand Tavia as well as offering us the space to love Naema.