Undertow by Michael Buckley (review)

Lyric has a big secret about her mother’s origins, and the further encroachment of the Alpha beings, her mother’s kin who have long been sequestered on the Coney Island shoreline, threatens to upend her life. While one might think that sharing genetic ties would make Lyric naturally more sympathetic, it isn’t really until she begins to fall for one of the human/sea creature hybrids that she begins to show she understands nuance, complexity, and cultural relativism. Once she does, however, she’s a teen driven to try to forge alliances, save her family (including her beloved best friends), and keep tensions between humans and Alphas at a simmer rather than full-scale war. The book attempts to make a point by comparing violence among the feared Alphas to abuse among the humans, but it’s heavy-handed and ineffective, since there’s little insight into what drives the Alphas’ long and diverse historical evolution. In addition, the key romance on which much of the novel rests is uncomfortable, given the hundreds of years of core social mores thrown overboard by the non-human, Fathom, who has been paired from an early age to another, to pursue Lyric. Even with the issues, however, this is a gripping story that is convincingly told, and astute readers may spot what is almost certainly some sharp political commentary about the ways our own nation has addressed “otherness” throughout our tumultuous history.