I really struggled to get into this book. The pacing was painfully slow, and it never managed to pull me in or hook my interest. I found it difficult to connect with the characters, especially the main character, whose actions felt inconsistent and, frankly, irritating at times. The use of multiple POVs and timelines added complexity but didn’t help the story flow. Not even the audiobook could keep me hooked; I found my mind wandering constantly and had to rewind several times. Overall, this one just didn’t resonate with me.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an ARC and Macmillan Audio for an advanced listening copy.

With a shocking opening, with main character Lucy attempting to strangle her ex-boyfriend then escaping to her older sister Jess' place to hide, this second book by Emilia Hart demonstrates that it is full of strong emotions, mystery, and darkness.

Using three timelines, one set in 1800, the others in 1999 and 2019, Hart keeps us guessing about the connection between the sisters in 1800s and the sisters in 1999 and 2019.

1800: Mary and Eliza are transported to Australia aboard a convict ship for some unknown crime. They suffer, along with several other women, on the long and arduous journey.

1999: Jess is sixteen-years old, lonely, artistic, and suffering from a strange allergy to water. She feels disconnected from her parents, and her schoolmates, but an art teacher gives her a boost of confidence when he sees something unusual and special in her drawings.

In 2019: After rushing to Jess' place for safety and anonymity, Lucy begins to discover Jess had all sorts of secrets. Lucy also learns about the history of the town Jess lives in, and how an abandoned baby was found there years earlier, and that there have been many stories for over a century by sailors, who have claimed they have heard women's voices in the ocean.

Lucy also begins to discover the secrets that have always been at the heart of her family., much to her sadness and anger.

I felt totally immersed in this story from the get-go. The descriptions of the hardships within the convict ship hold are claustrophobic and nightmarish. Then, Lucy's family's dynamics and secrets are corrosive and well drawn, causing Luch and Jess much pain.

While this got off to a slightly slower start than the author's "Weyward", I thoroughly enjoyed this story, which I both read and listened to. I'm familiar with voice actor Barrie Kreinik's work, and she does a great job voicing all the characters and accents and emotions.

Thank you to Netgalley, St. Martin's Press and Macmillan Audio for these ARCs in exchange for my review.

We hope you remember us sharing Weyward by Emilia Hart. It was amazing! Well, when we saw that she had another one coming out April 1st, we had to get our hands on it. Thanks to Netgalley, we got the audio version early and devoured it. I would like to share The Sirens by Emilia Hart.
This is a dual timeline novel that ties together in a very surprising way. Our first timeline is 2019 where Lucy wakes from an extremely vivid dream in a horrible situation and runs to the safety of her sister, Jess’s, side. Her older sister has been distant lately and has recently bought a house on the coast of New South Wales. Lucy doesn’t announce her arrival and finds that Jess is not at her house when she gets there. But, her keys and her cellphone are there. So, since she doesn’t want to tell their parents what she did, Lucy decides to stay at Jess’ house to wait for her to come home. As she explores the run-down house, she sees some of her sister’s paintings that she has been working on and they are eerily similar to dreams she has been having. Over her days on her own, she learns the strange history of the town and cliffs that Jess’ house resides in. There have been multiple unexplained missing men over the last few decades. Lucy can’t help but try to find out what is going on. After almost a week of waiting, Lucy really starts to worry that something horrible has happened to her sister Jess and starts down a path of discovery that will end up answering questions she never dreamed of getting answered.
One of the questions she has always had is about a strange skin sensitivity to water and Lucy doesn’t know where it came from because no one else in her family seems to have the same issue. As she has grown up, Lucy has figured out how to live with it, but has always wondered “why her”.
The second timeline is in the 1800’s where we meet Mary and Eliza. They are sisters who have always only had each other and their father to depend on. After making a horrible mistake, they find themselves on a convict ship heading for Australia. They have been forced to leave their father and their home in Ireland to live the rest of their lives in a penal colony. The best case scenario they have to look forward to is being chosen to be a wife to a stranger and separated from one another. The worst case scenario is something they can’t even fathom.
On the ship, they befriend other female convicts over their multi-month trip. As they continue on this ship, they find their bodies are reacting in strange ways ever since they boarded the ship and launched into the ocean.
This story holds family and especially sisters front and center. The relationship between the two sets are centuries apart, but both encapsulate the question of what you would do for your family.
More about the sisters - especially Mary and Eliza (who is blind but sees more sometimes than Mary)
This story also brings in the retelling of the Sirens in greek mythology. They were described in the Odyssey. Odysseus had his crew stuff wax in their ears so that they weren’t called by the Siren’s songs to crash into the rocky cliffs. In most stories, it was Demeter who turned them into the ½ human ½ bird-like creatures that they were.
Like Weyward, Hart includes some magical elements in this book, so suspend your beliefs and just enjoy this amazing reimagining and sisterly tale.

Like the author's previous novel, Weyward (which I loved!), The Sirens is a story about women through time. There is Lucy in 2019 who has run away from university to her sister's home after attacking a man who betrayed her, but her sister is nowhere to be found. When Lucy finds her sister Jessica's diary, we get to hear about Jessica's troubling teenage years in the late 1990s. And, interwoven with these sisters' stories, we have Mary and Eliza, Irish sisters living in the 1800s who have been sentenced to transportation to Australia. These women also share a strange allergy to water, which causes their skin to peel and crack. While I enjoyed the premise of the novel and was entranced by the atmospheric settings (from a molding old house on a cliffside to the dank, cramped quarters of a nineteenth century ship), the moral of the story felt a little heavy handed.

The single narrator did an excellent job capturing each point of view, giving clear voicing to each, so it was easy to distinguish characters. Her ease with accents and excellent pacing enhanced the story tremendously.

I was excited to read this because I really enjoyed Weyward. The Sirens was just ok for me. I just didn't feel drawn to the characters. The story was interesting at times but not as much as a page turner for me. I listened to it on audio.

Thank you to Emilia Hart, NetGalley, and St. Martin's Press for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to love this book. It had a lot of things going for it. It was beautifully, almost lyrically, written. I loved the multiple POVs throughout the book. I also appreciated that this book is, at its heart, about the unshakable and primal power of women and what they can do together.

My struggle with this book was the execution. At various times I had a hard time following the plot and the through-lines between the different timelines and perspectives. Temporally, the book lost me a few times. I also felt that, by the end, there were still a lot of unanswered questions and loose threads that never got tied up. I also struggled with the motivations/actions of some of the characters, as it felt like there were several times where characters' actions or behavior seemed unrealistic in light of the circumstances and choices seemed to be made for the sole purpose of advancing the plot. It drew me out of the world of the book. All in all, this book was an enjoyable time but not the most incredible thing I've ever read.

I must say, Barrie Kreinik was the highlight of this work for me. She is an incredible narrator and I cannot wait to listen to more from her.

This was probably a 4.5 star for me until the very end.

I feel super conflicted about the epilogue of this book. I almost wish it didn't exist. I reread it a day later, and picked up on more details and reveals I didn't gather the first time. But I'm still trying to make sense of it. I'd love to pick the author's brain on this one.

But again, I was immersed in Emilia's writing and love her women-centered stories. Compared to the first book, which painted men in a mostly negative light, this book asks the reader to question... what about the good men? And where do you draw the line between good men who make mistakes, and bad men who hurt and oppress the female population as a whole?

The Sirens was beautifully written and had such a haunting coastal atmosphere. The story blends mermaid lore, family secrets, and feminist themes in a way that feels both emotional and a little eerie. I really enjoyed the present-day storyline with Lucy searching for her missing sister and uncovering dark secrets in the small town. Jess’s diary entries were my favorite part because they tied so much of the mystery together. The historical timeline with Mary and Eliza was interesting, but at times it felt disconnected from the modern plot, and I wished the connection had been clearer earlier on. Some parts of the book took a while to click for me, and I felt a bit confused waiting for everything to tie together. Even so, the descriptions of the sirens and the setting were vivid and captivating.

Completely captivating and compelling, this book will keep you guessing until the end. The non linear timeline captures interest with secrets, loss, tragedy, and magical realism which bring two seemingly unrelated plots into one.

Feminine rage sets the stage for a magical, mysterious awakening that changes everything in both of these women's lives forever.

If you love historical fiction with a non linear timeline and a hefty dash of fairytale magic, this one is for you!!

I enjoyed this, but at the moment, I struggled to keep up with the story. I love the plot and writing, and it might have just been the time I read it.

When Lucy wakes up she has her hands around her ex boyfriends throat, she has no memory of how she got there. Given the public drama that went on between them, it looks really bad for her. She flees to a small coastal town where her sister lives to get some advice. But when she finds her sister missing her attempts to figure out where her sister went and uncover some shocking secrets in Lucy's family and a supernatural seeming tie to the local history. The narrative is split with the historic re-telling of two sister-convicts shipped from Ireland to Australia in horrendous conditions.
I liked the present day story it was filled with drama and intrigue, but the historic storyline was lacking and I found myself bored during those sections so that is why it lost some points for me. A great exploration of some serious feminist issues including abuse and online shaming. I enjoyed the magical realism elements.

The narrator was great for The Sirens, but I felt myself longing for the physical copy. I’m drawn to stories of mer people and this one did disappoint.

I'm grateful to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC and giving me the opportunity to review this book ahead of its release.

The cover of Weyward grabbed my attention from the new books display at the library. The nature-themed illustrations drew me in, and the description hooked me.

When I saw that Emilia Hart was releasing a new book, The Sirens, I knew I wanted to read it. It has a dual timeline, revealing the story from the perspectives of two women, separated by hundreds of years. One, Mary, is a prisoner aboard a ship to Australia with her sister. The other, Lucy, is a modern-day woman who flees to her older sister's house in search of answers and moral support, only to find her sister missing.

The story unfolds as Lucy reads her sister's journal, which only raises more questions. She begins an investigation, trying to uncover how her sister's disappearance connects to the multiple missing men in town and the increasingly vivid and strange dreams she's been having.

I really enjoyed this book. While there are some details I think could have been elaborated on, it was a good read overall, and I would definitely recommend it.

Unfortunately, I DNF’d at about 25%. The writing was really beautiful, but I just couldn’t get into the storyline or characters. I am a mood reader so this might’ve been the right book at the wrong time because the summary sounds incredibly interesting but it just didn’t grab me while reading.

A story of two sets of sisters, centuries apart, mysteriously linked by the wonder of dreams and the allure of the sea.

I enjoyed the dual timelines and the storytelling. This one kept me engaged. Audio was well done.

Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for an ALC.

Solid 4.5 melodic stars

This audiobook is incredibly well narrated, including the use of both Irish and Australian accents, and singing of the songs.

Trigger warnings: sexual assault and youth/adult relationships.
As a survivor, I was able to deeply enjoy this book, though it may be entirely too much for others (and was very uncomfortable at times).

Emilia Hart's powerful writing does it again!! This story really got to me, and brought up so many emotions - including sadness, anger, feminine rage, shame, curiosity, doubt and fear. She is a master at describing the feminine experience and excruciating family secrets, with a hint of the mythological.

Following the stories of two sets of sisters through their separate timelines (1800, 1998, and 2018), the story slowly begins to intertwine into a tale of legendary proportions. Some bits are subtle, while others reach through the story to smack the reader right in the face. Being able to balance the two different sets of stories is essential.

If you are someone who enjoys multi-timeline historical fiction, long-unsolved mysteries to be solved, feminine rage, a touch of the otherworldly, and the vulnerability of true secrets, this book is absolutely for you. I also recommend experiencing it via the audiobook, if at all possible.

Huge gratitude to Netgalley, and the publisher Macmillan Audio, for an Audio-ARC of this book, in exchange for my honest review.

I unfortunately DNF'd this at 20%,. I'm sure people who love historical fiction and dual timelines might love this but I had a hard time getting engaged with both storylines and the different points of view. Thank you for this ALC!

I did not love this as much as the author's Weyward. I struggled getting into this one and found it too boring to continue.

While I enjoyed the feminine rage aspect, I feel like the story was dragged out and was hard to connect with. The dual timeliness weren’t different enough to be distinguishable. I would have liked to have more parts on the background of the sirens, it was a lot of build up for a small explanation

This was an ok novel, it took me almost a month to finish. It just didn't capture my attention like Weyward did.