Wolf Siren
I expected Wolf Siren to be a story about self-discovery. Instead, I found it to be a story about fear. What makes the novel so effective, is its refusal to show prejudice as simple cruelty. It understands that people often fear what they cannot categorise, and that once fear has taken hold, compassion becomes remarkably easy to abandon. Red was a compelling protagonist to me because she eventually realises that being understood is separate from being accepted. To me, the novel's most powerful idea was that loneliness is not always caused by isolation, but by the feeling that others have already decided who you are. After reading it, that truth felt far more unsettling than anything else in the book.

Ami