Messy mermaids being messy mermaids: a review of Bind Me Tighter Still

Bind Me Tighter Still frames itself as a novel about power, womanhood, motherhood, gender, identity, belonging, and coming-of-age. Borrowing from mermaid and siren mythology (along with a little vampirism thrown in there), it tells a story about women trying really hard not to define themselves by the men around them. You follow Ceto and her daughter Naia as they learn the ropes of what it means to be a woman living under patriarchy. The story is mostly a character study, and the book attempts to capture an experience without always explicitly gesturing at how readers should feel about any of it, even though it is very obvious where the author stands on the issues. (You don't write a mermaid novel about womanhood without being a feminist.)

I should have really enjoyed it, but I only ended up liking the ideas behind the story, and the book could have just as easily been an essay about gender, performance, and the male gaze. The problem is the characters are a bit stiff. They don't have sharp observation. They don't make biting commentary. I didn't connect with them at all. They just do what's needed of them to serve the story's somewhat messy central metaphors.

While the characters' narration is painfully generic, their situation is almost too extraordinary. It's convoluted, poorly motivated, and lacking a strong sense of place. The prose has a fluid quality to it, much like the ocean, but it's not lyrical, atmospheric, or precise. Ceto and Naia start the story as performers in a mermaid theme park called Sirenland. I still have absolutely no idea what the theme park looks like, and the reasons for its existence are so bizarre. I appreciate the author wanting to resist giving easy answers by making everything messy and complex, but this book is way messier than it needs to be. Ceto's motivations for everything are weird and flimsy. Her behavior doesn't feel real or organic. I get that she's not human, so she makes inhuman decisions, but I wasn't buying that excuse. She doesn't act like a fish out of water often enough for me to be convinced of her inhumanity. I don't need every mermaid to lose their balance when they finally grow a pair of legs, but if I'm to believe they're going to make bizarre choices on account of their inhumanity, I do expect some scenes that emphasize how alienated they are from things most humans take for granted. We just don't get any scene of that nature from Ceto. She adapts to life on land without issue. It's not that life is easy for her, but her experiences are not that of a mermaid living alongside humans. Her experiences are that of any human woman in less than ideal circumstances.

Naia is a slightly easier character to swallow, but not by much. She's just an angsty teenager. Some magical shenanigans exaggerate her feelings and experiences, allowing the book to better capture girlhood, puberty, and adolescence, but while all the metaphors and symbols around her coming of age are cleverly deployed, Naia herself doesn't really feel like such a good example of what an actual teenage girl is like. (How many fifteen year old girls in her situation would be able to talk like they've just taken their first gender theory course in college? I accept that ideas around performativity might come to her more naturally given her upbringing, but some of her epiphanies are way too sophisticated.) Her story is okay in the second half when the plot picks up, and the final chapters do hit hard, but it's not enough. This narrative is too character-driven for the plotting and pacing to matter all that much, and the characters aren't strong enough to carry the story. (Don't even get me started on how boring and irrelevant the side characters are.)