{"id":11211,"date":"2026-06-01T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11211"},"modified":"2026-05-30T22:44:41","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T02:44:41","slug":"sorrowland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/01\/sorrowland\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorrowland."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rivers Solomon\u2019s debut novel <em><a href=\"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/18\/an-unkindness-of-ghosts\/\">An Unkindess of Ghosts<\/a><\/em> was a marvel of ingenious plotting and superb character development, using its generation ship as a setting without excessive focus on its mechanics, instead exploring racial caste systems through the literal stratification of its residents across higher and lower decks by skin tones. Their second novel, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9781250849267\">Sorrowland<\/a><\/em>, shifts its setting to a modern-day gothic milieu, following a queer Black woman who escapes from a Christian cult\u2019s compound in California, only to find the real world inscrutable and inhospitable to her and her two infant children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Vern Riley was raised at in the Blessed Gardens of Cain, which began as a sort of Black autonomy movement but morphed, as cults often do, into something more insidious when one man took control of the group and converted it into a cult of personality, complete with control regimens and isolation from the outside world. Vern was even forced to marry that first leader\u2019s son, Reverend Sherman, who took over when his father died and continues to suppress the group\u2019s members, including strapping all cult members down while they sleep. She flees one day while pregnant, giving birth to twins in the woods near the compound, beginning a flight that will take her across multiple states, exposing her to a civilization she barely knows or understands, before her eventual return to try to liberate those still in Sherman\u2019s grip \u2013 including her mother and brother \u2013 and the exposure of the malevolent forces propping up the entire endeavor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a <em>lot<\/em> going on in <em>Sorrowland<\/em>, to put it mildly, from the obvious exploration of racism and racial stratification in American society, as well as religion\u2019s role as a tool of oppression, to allusions to the Black power movement and to government efforts to fight it like COINTELPRO. The Blessed Gardens of Cain may be a Black cult, but there are parallels to the Branch Davidians, Heaven\u2019s Gate, and the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, the last of which received significant press attention <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/04\/10\/books\/review\/the-oracles-daughter-harrison-hill.html\">when two women who escaped told their stories in a new book<\/a>. (The temporal precedence is backwards, but the cult Solomon envisioned sounds a hell of a lot like the ACMTC.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<script src=https:\/\/bookshop.org\/widgets.js data-type=\"book\" data-affiliate-id=\"2960\" data-sku=\"9781250849267\"><\/script>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The book could easily have been weighed down by all of its meaning and metaphor, but Solomon gives the readers a compelling, complex protagonist in Vern, who pairs extreme innocence in the ways of the outside world (and the people in it) with strong survivalist skills honed in her time in the cult. She\u2019s on the run almost immediately, first from what she believes is a demon chasing her in the woods, and later from enforcers associated with the cult trying to track her down. She does all of this with two infants and later toddlers in tow \u2013 the novel skips ahead in time at several points \u2013 giving the whole novel an adventure\/horror vibe to keep it moving; every time I thought the story would bog down in its seriousness, something would happen to keep the pace moving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Sorrowland<\/em> is still a gloomy read \u2013 I can\u2019t say the title didn\u2019t warn me \u2013 as Vern runs into obstacle after obstacle, seldom of her own making, and even the denouement only provides partial satisfaction, although I\u2019d argue a fully happy ending would have been unrealistic and out of sync with the remainder of the book. Solomon also explains some of the more mysterious events of the plot with a clever detail, the one bit here that takes this novel into the world of science fiction, although again those elements are there in service of a broader point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I still prefer <em>An Unkindness of Ghosts<\/em>, as that book\u2019s protagonist Aster Gray was even stronger than Vern and the mystery within that book was even more compelling, although Solomon set a high bar for their next novel to clear. (They also wrote a novella in between the two called <em>The Deep<\/em>, a collaboration with Daveed Diggs\u2019 rap trio clipping.) That novel also had better pacing, perhaps because it seemed to try to tackle fewer serious themes, with <em>Sorrowland<\/em> a more ambitious work. This book was one of two winners of the Otherwise Award in 2021, given to sci-fi or fantasy works that explore or expand our understanding of gender; explaining how <em>Sorrowland<\/em> does so might risk spoiling some of its secrets, but it\u2019s a worthy honoree that also gets into queer themes and how Vern\u2019s journey is even further complicated by her intersectionality. That Solomon could take something this dark and still make it an exciting read is a testament to their talent as storyteller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Next up: I\u2019m about halfway through Dinaw Mengestu\u2019s <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/2960\/9781594485398\">How to Read the Air<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rivers Solomon\u2019s debut novel An Unkindess of Ghosts was a marvel of ingenious plotting and superb character development, using its generation ship as a setting without excessive focus on its mechanics, instead exploring racial caste systems through the literal stratification of its residents across higher and lower decks by skin tones. Their second novel, Sorrowland, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31,36,161,143,1520,524],"class_list":["post-11211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-african-american-literature","tag-american-literature","tag-highly-recommended","tag-lgbt-literature","tag-otherwise-award","tag-science-fiction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11212,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11211\/revisions\/11212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}