The Sirens by Emilia Hart🎧 Barrie Kreinik

Synopsis (via Goodreads): A story of sisters separated by hundreds of years but bound together in more ways than they can imagine.

2019: Lucy awakens in her ex-lover’s room in the middle of the night with her hands around his throat. Horrified, she flees to her sister’s house on the coast of New South Wales hoping Jess can help explain the vivid dreams that preceded the attack—but her sister is missing. As Lucy waits for her return, she starts to unearth strange rumours about Jess’s town—tales of numerous missing men, spread over decades. A baby abandoned in a sea-swept cave. Whispers of women’s voices on the waves. All the while, her dreams start to feel closer than ever.

1800: Mary and Eliza are torn from their loving home in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship heading for Australia. As the boat takes them farther and farther away from all they know, they begin to notice unexplainable changes in their bodies.

A breathtaking tale of female resilience, The Sirens is an extraordinary novel that captures the sheer power of sisterhood and the indefinable magic of the sea.

The Sirens was a nice change from the romance/fantasy I've been reading, and I thought Barrie Kreinik did a wonderful job as the narrator. I was even pleasantly surprised when she started signing! I did have to adjust the listening speed to 1.30x instead of my normal 1.10x because it's a slower paced book, and that speed honestly made the story flow a little better.

I thought the dual POVs and timelines were an interesting way to tell this story. However, I found them both to be pretty dull characters overall. Mary is trapped on a ship as a convict (not really guilty of doing anything other than protecting herself) and Lucy stays in a house for most of the book. We don't really learn much about their backgrounds or get much character development, but we do get a lot of information about Lucy's sister, Jess. Unfortunately, I was able to predict the "twist," so it wasn't the surprise I think the author was hoping for. 

We get Jess's POV from a diary that Lucy finds. Although, it didn't really read like a diary. It honestly just felt like another perspective for the story. When it does start being Jess's POV and not a diary entry, the transition initially left me a little confused (probably because I wasn't paying close enough attention to the title headings when she read them). Then we have three alternating perspectives that get shorter and shorter as everything comes together.

I also went into this one thinking there would be more sirens, but we don't really see how they play a role in the book until the end of the story. The author teases their existence and which characters might be one, but I wish they'd been more of a focal point. I think seeing them in their environment and learning from them why they did what they did, would have been an interesting perspective. Yes, we get information at the end, but the conclusion of this book really ruined it for me. 

All the men that have disappeared have been bad or corrupt in some way. There's definitely a big female focus in The Sirens and most of the men you come into contact with aren't great. So why would Mary choose a married man to conceive a child with? Does that not make him just as bad as the ones that were condemned and drowned for their actions? It contradicted everything about the story and purpose of the sirens. 

Overall, it was an okay read and I liked it enough to finish the book. I think the author fumbled with this one a bit though, which is disappointing because it had a really interesting premise. I just think she could have done a lot more with the story and the characters. (★★★☆☆)