What baffles me after reading it, in a good way, is to realize how many of the characters in this novel (who feel elevated and perhaps unreal) actually lived and are on record. She is not overly directive in saying "And now the goddess is doing this" but lets her words narrate some of the shifts in time and place. One thing I know is that I appreciate that the author lets the reader do the work to fit the pieces together and fill in the gaps. I feel like all of it is still swirling around in my head. In fact I am feeling I should not have read it the way I did, all but 50 pages in one sitting. There is a lot going on here - African mythology, ancient ritual, an international cast of women spanning different time periods, magic or voodoo, slave revolutions, slavery, freedom, etc., etc.
This is the third book I have read by Nalo Hopkinson, still until Veronica chose it for the Sword and Laser pick, it was unknown to me. With unapologetically sensual prose, Nalo Hopkinson, the Nebula Award–winning author of Midnight Robber, explores slavery through the lives of three historical women touched by a goddess in this “electrifying bravura performance by one of our most important writers” (Junot Díaz). And Meritet, inspired by Ezili, flees her enslavement and makes a pilgrimage to Egypt, where she becomes known as Saint Mary. Jeanne slowly succumbs to the ravages of age and syphilis when her lover is unable to escape his mother’s control. Despite her magic, Mer suffers as a slave on a sugar plantation until Ezili plants the seeds of uprising in her mind. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women’s lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant’s “unused vitality” to draw Ezili-the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love-into the physical world.Īs Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife’s body-as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria.īound together by Ezili and “the salt road” of their sweat, blood, and tears, the three women struggle against a hostile world, unaware of the goddess’s presence in their lives. In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. tour de force” blends fantasy, folklore, and the history of women and slavery ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Nebula Award Finalist: This “sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic.
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