Chlorine

Ren Yu measures her days in laps and in the sharp smell of chlorine, a swimmer whose future seems mapped out: medals, scholarship, approval. Beneath the practiced calm is a fierce, restless longing to be other, to move and melt into the water itself, a desire that draws her toward a slow and uncanny metamorphosis. Part coming of age and part unsettling fable, the narrative unfolds in sensuous, lyrical passages as Ren negotiates love, exile, and the costs of claiming a different self. Tender, fierce, and sometimes disquieting, Chlorine asks what we sacrifice to become who we truly are and how bodies, memory, and belonging reshape one another.

~ Included for its haunting portrayal of sapphic desire, immigrant displacement, and the body as a terrain of resistance, offering a lyrical, emotionally complex account of queer becoming ~