The Lift Up is excited to be back after our brief summer break with Season 2, Episode 6, featuring Monique Roffey's genre-bending novel The Mermaid of Black Conch! On one level, The Mermaid of Black Conch is a story of an unlikely romance between an ancient Taino woman-turned-mermaid and a modern-day Caribbean fisherman. But it is a much larger story too—about colonial history and its social and economic legacies; interactions and relationships that cross racial, ethnic, cultural, and class lines; and notions of womanhood, sisterhood, and the ways women fight against gender norms and expectations and manage to thrive despite a culture of misogyny.