Scorpionfish

✨SCORPIONFISH made me ache for pre-pandemic life; for the casual contact we had with each other, for blurry, sweaty nights out, for the spontaneity and freedom of the days before. It also did so much more. Through Mira’s journey back to Athens, beginning as she steps off the plane, Bakopolous investigates the refugee crisis, nationalism, Greek political history, and the idea of being something, or someone.

It’s a story of a country in crisis, mirrored by Mira’s own interpersonal crises. Time, setting, and self are intimately connected. Throughout Mira’s return to her childhood home, time and space weigh on her, each layer of her self piled on top of another—building the self into a composite, instead of stripping it back to reveal some deep inner truth. Time collapses at some points and expands at others.

The question of the self inevitably leads to an exploration of identity and nationality, making the argument that these things are not essential, not ingrained in us from birth in some inalienable way. Mira befriends a teenager, Rami, a refugee from Damascus who is working on a graphic novel. He shares her sense of groundlessness, but in a completely different way. What is a home? Is it something you have to choose? Is it an idea or a place? Politics, here, are not an abstraction. Arrival is not a concept that exists.

I really could go on and on about SCORPIONFISH! This is the kind of book I love—to spend pages and pages nestled in the brain of a smart woman, to see the way her brain makes sense of the world—it truly gives me life. To read stories about women continuing to demand better for themselves, for all of us, clear-eyed and ferocious and tender, is something so special to me and this book delivered that on a really impressive scale.