As someone who has been bound in multiple sets of chains from an early age, this book was extremely cathartic for me to write. I will be the first to admit, though, that it is not an easy read. On the one hand, it is about powerful women who control their destinies. Yet on the other, it is very much about oppressed women who have to rise above, and society doesn’t really like that.

Those aren’t the kind of stories most of us enjoy reading. We need to, nowadays more than ever, but we would rather have the stories about “Oh, yay, witches and selkies and they all live happily, with the selkies in the ocean and the witches on land, and everything’s hunky dory and everybody has their own power and they’re great and everything’s fine.” Unfortunately, that’s not reality. History is full of oppressed women who have been literally and figuratively bound in chains that they had to free themselves from and rise above before they could do great things.

Sometimes the chains are different. They might be chains of love our parents put on us because they want to keep us safe, or chains a significant other put on us because they want to control us. They could be chains society put on us when they said “this is how you’re supposed to be and this is your area that you can be in.”

Take a dog on a leash. The dog can stretch the leash from its dog house as far as it will go and have some semblance of mobility and freedom. However, it can’t go past the last chain link, lest it risk choking itself. When we believe the lies society tells us about how we are supposed to act, to look, to dress and think and speak as women, we become like that dog. We’re on society’s chain, on its leash. And society tells us if we break our chain and run free, then we’re bad dogs. However, if we stay on our chain and walk the yard and are content to sniff and play and bark at squirrels without ever really going anywhere, then we’re good dogs.

They may even be chains we put on ourselves, by telling ourselves that we’re not good enough, not beautiful enough, not strong enough, not smart enough, not tall enough, not skinny enough, whatever. We bind ourselves with those chains, prevent ourselves from reaching our true potential. Ultimately, that is what all chains do: oppress us and keep us from reaching our full potential as a woman.

In Salt and Sorrow, we have two types of chains. First, you have the selkies, who are oppressed women living in a male antagonistic society. They’re weak. They’re very subservient. These are women who have literally had their power, their voice, their very being stolen from them, so they have to rise above that to find their voices and power again by finding their skins and becoming, or re-becoming, in this case, who and what they really are.

Second, you have the witches, who on the surface seem very powerful, with all of their magic. But they’re bound as well by chains of their own making, and instead of trying to fix their mistakes, they stay stuck. They keep making the sacrifices and saying “that’s just our way of life, that’s how it’s meant to be,” until Arron comes along. Then Nova’s emotions, which in the beginning she sees as a weakness because that’s not how she was brought up to be or how she fashioned herself to be, turn out to be her biggest strength because they make her examine her actions, the curse, and how her family lives, and force her to search for a way out. In doing, she breaks the chains that bind her and her family.

So, no, it’s not an easy read. However, I think it’s a very necessary read for women and young girls everywhere because it teaches us to not be confined in chains, whatever they might be. We must one, recognize the chains. Two, figure out a way to break them. Then three, and most importantly, keep them off because there’s always another set of chains that someone is going to try to put on us. 

We don’t all start out as powerful women like Nova. Take Harriet Tubman, for example. She was a slave. She was not powerful. She was literally probably the least powerful person she knew, but she rose above that and helped free so many people. In many ways, I modeled Undine after her. Undine is weak. She’s the least of the women. She’s not favored. She’s just there. But she’s the one who ends up rising above and saving them all simply because she questions everything. She dares to go against the men’s wishes. She dares to feel, to hope for something better, and that grows into something else that allows her to regain her power and help the other women regain theirs.

So again, I do think it’s a very necessary read, and a very empowering read. It’s just not easy to get past the first couple chapters, because we don’t want to look at the ugly of society. We want to see the beautiful part of the story. We don’t want to see the ugly underneath, only the fact is we all have something ugly underneath. We all have dirt and grime and mistakes we’ve made and pits we’ve had to crawl out of. Life is not a shiny gold nugget. It’s a piece of coal. You have to refine it, hone it, and clean it, then refine, hone, and clean it some more, over and over again, until you have a diamond. And this is the message I’m trying to give with this story: that we all start out in a place of weakness. It’s recognizing that weakness and rising above it that allows us to free ourselves and have our strongest, wildest nature as women.