Namesake by Adrienne young

Original Instagram post: July 8, 2021

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Seafaring books are a low-key favorite of mine. I should read more of them. Cause pirates. And ship crews are the perfect set up to my favorite trope: found family.

Have you read this duology? I loved Fable and Namesake so much. I probably wouldn’t have picked up Fable if not for bookstagram. It came in The Bookish Box, but I had a bad habit of just letting those books sit.

Fable is the kind of hero I love to find in YA books — a girl who is fiercely independent and driven, and who learns to accept herself and find her place over the course of books. Her relationship with Saint, her father, drives the books as much as her relationship with West, the taciturn young captain who offers her a place on his crew when she needs it most.

The dredgers fascinated me. They reminded me of the haenyeo, the female divers in the Korean province of Jeju. It is a dying tradition, but these women can dive up to 30 metres (98 ft) in just a wetsuit and mask to harvest abalone, sea urchins, octopus and so many other things. Mollusk jewels of the sea rather than actual jewels.

I know that opinions of Namesake were mixed. It has a different feel and a different kind of story than Fable. Personally, I enjoyed it. I tend to think about duologies as one big book. Namesake felt more like the second half of a novel rather than a second book to me. We pick up right where we left off. And if you think about it, do you want the second half of a book to just be more of what you got in the first half? Not really. I always like the stakes to shift, the character to learn new lessons and meet new challenges. And that’s what I felt like I got.

I’m so excited that we’re going to get another story from the Narrows in the fall.

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