Review: Naamah

Title: Naamah

Author: Sarah Blake

Genre: Strong Magical Realism feel, but it’s also set way back in biblical times so potentially Historical Fantasy … it’s definitely weird and fantasy-adjacent, but it’s hard to nail down

Trigger Warnings: Death, child death, animal death (graphic), pregnancy, childbirth, excrement, gore, sexual content, infidelity, unreality, incest

Back Cover:

A wildly imaginative novel of the reluctant heroine who rescued life on earth.

With the coming of the Great Flood—the mother of all disasters—only one family was spared, drifting on an endless sea, waiting for the waters to subside. We know the story of Noah, moved by divine vision to launch their escape. Now, in a work of astounding invention, acclaimed writer Sarah Blake reclaims the story of his wife, Naamah, the matriarch who kept them alive. Here is the woman torn between faith and fury, lending her strength to her sons and their wives, caring for an unruly menagerie of restless creatures, silently mourning the lover she left behind. Here is the woman escaping into the unreceded waters, where a seductive angel tempts her to join a strange and haunted world. Here is the woman tormented by dreams and questions of her own—questions of service and self-determination, of history and memory, of the kindness or cruelty of fate.

In fresh and modern language, Blake revisits the story of the Ark that rescued life on earth, and rediscovers the agonizing burdens endured by the woman at the heart of the story. Naamah is a parable for our time: a provocative fable of body, spirit, and resilience.

Review:

This book is dark, graphic, occasionally gross, and above all extremely weird. “Wildly imaginative” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I picked it up mainly because I am all about mildly-to-severely blasphemous retellings of Bible stories. The story of Noah’s Ark, told from the perspective of Noah’s wife who doesn’t seem to be fully on board with their deity’s decision to genocide the world, seemed right up my alley. And there were indeed many things to like in this book.

Things I liked about Naamah:

• A raw and deeply human story about unnamed and unconsidered Biblical women (Naamah herself, but also her sons’ wives)
• The logistics of keeping eight people and probably thousands of animals alive and sane on a boat for nearly a year
• The emotions that come with being on a boat with a bunch of animals for nearly a year and basically being the only survivors of an intentional apocalypse
• Naamah herself, a woman who meets the living God face-to-face and still tells him to fuck off

As for what I didn’t like quite so much:

Now, I am no stranger to weird books. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I generally enjoy weird books. But this book is so weird in so many directions that I’m not at all sure what I’m supposed to make of it. It’s practically plotless, held together by sex scenes and extensive dream sequences, and for something that’s ostensibly some kind of Biblical reimagining contains a whole bunch of nonsense that doesn’t seem to fit anything.

We should probably talk about Abraham’s wife Sarai showing up as a time-traveling god-like figure. Or the sentient bird that can only talk when he’s sharing Naamah’s dreams. Or the angel living underwater with a bunch of dead children. Or that scene where Sarai takes Naamah to the present day and she watches Law & Order: SVU. We should probably talk about it, but I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to make of any of this.

Naamah has a unique problem where if you cut out the sex scenes, the dream sequences, and the weird stuff that feels discordant with the rest of the book, there isn’t a book. It’s part slice-of-life on the Ark and part magical mystical unreality I-don’t-even-know-what. I appreciate the sacrilege and the symbolism of Noah’s wife questioning the atrocity of the flood. But I’m unsure of the plot, point, purpose, moral, or any reason for this book to exist, and I’m unsure if there is one to find.

Is Naamah a good book? I’m not even sure how you judge a book like this. When I finished it, I found myself scrambling for meaning because there must surely be a point or idea or theme or something here, right? I was left with an overwhelming sense of what-in-the-world-did-I-just-read befuddlement. I legitimately have no idea what I’m supposed to take away from this story. Naamah has me well and truly stumped.