Review: The Drowned Man’s Daughter, by C.J. Lavigne

The Drowned Man’s Daughter
C.J. Lavigne
176 pages
Release: September 9, 2025
ISBN 9781774391204
Publisher: NeWest Press

C.J. Lavigne who, besides being a PhD in communications studies, and holding an MA in English Literature, is an award-winning speculative fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared in On Spec, Fusion Fragment, Augur Magazine, and PodCastle, and her debut novel, In Veritas (NeWest Press, 2020), was shortlisted for the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Speculative Fiction and the 2021 Crawford Award, as well as being named the 2021 Book Publishers Association of Alberta Speculative Fiction Book of the Year.

The Drowned Man’s Daughter is her second novel.

But first, the marketing blurb:
Naia never wanted to be a goddess. But the legend of her as the miracle child of the ocean and a drowned man who washed up on the shore has overtaken her life, forcing her to lie to survive. Desperate to escape from the stalwart adoration of the people she loves, Naia longs to leave the island. But the ocean, filled with deadly mer, and the mainland, filled with noxious moss that drives anyone it touches to madness, block her way on either side.

There’s nowhere for Naia to go. She can’t keep pretending, and soon she is going to be found out…

I have to say when I read the opening paragraph of The Drowned Man’s Daughter, I had that delicious feeling I was going to be pulled into a transportive story, and Lavigne delivered beautifully. Her writing and story-telling ability are top of the game, a novelist capable of creating stories which transcend genre and are just simply excellent literature.

What Lavigne creates in this novel is a dystopian world bordering on fantasy, in which fantasy exists in the hopelessness of hope, in the desperate exigencies of survival. I was minded of Dante’s Inferno: Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

I write that partly as praise for the tension in, and scope of this novel, and partly as caution for sensitive readers. This is not a happy story. This is a story about the brutalities of survival in a catastrophic climate change transformation, cleverly crafted. The characters to which Lavigne gives life are understandable, clearly realized, revealed in an immersive point of view which allows the reader to fully engage. Tension throughout the plot is intense, relentless, driving a reader to turn the page, and the next, and the next.

It’s also a story about being caught in the trap of legend, of becoming legend, of living up to a community’s expectations, knowing all the while you’re going to fail, and fail epically because it’s not just your life at stake, but every single member of your tribe, and you’re just one very ill-equipped girl.

If I have any quibble at all it is that I felt there could have been a few more breadcrumbs offered by way of explanation of how civilization got to this point, and just what were the dangers of the environment, and the creatures of the sea. But that quibble is minor and truly doesn’t significantly affect the story.

It is Lavigne’s ending, however, which is the most brilliant stroke of all. She suddenly breaks point of view and slips into an unreliable narrator who poses a direct question to the reader, challenges that and offers an alternative ending, and then another, and another, all of which are perfect, all of which speak eloquently to the uncertainty not only of the world in which Lavigne’s characters live, but of the uncertainties in our own lives and how a single moment, a single action, can completely change the course of lives. And thus, Lavigne’s The Drowned Man’s Daughter joins the canon of speculative literary fiction inhabited by Canada’s greats.

Very highly recommended.