hiding in the bookshelves #5

When looking through one of our partially-obscured bedroom bookshelves I came across Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. With it I found Mama Day by Gloria Naylor. Not paying much attention to the cover of Mama Day, I assumed it was one of Hopkinson's novels since I remember trying to get my hands on more than one of them after reading The New Moon's Arms (see post). I simply read the synopses from the back covers of both books to decide which one I'd post about. It wasn't until I was at the computer looking up the book's online to create links for this post that I realized that Mama Day was by a different author.

I don't doubt that those who read the book descriptions posted below will wonder how I could possibly confuse the authorship, assuming these two very different novels were written by the same person. The answer is quite simple. While Hopkinson's early work is very much in the realm of science fiction, her more recent novels feel different, like southern fiction with a dash of magical realism (like, if I may be so bold, Gloria Naylor's novel). Both women have had their work described as being in the tradition of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. So, now that I've explained that, I feel a little less silly about my mistake.

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson

The Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint celebrates Carnival in traditional fashion, and Tan-Tan, a young reveler, is masked as the Midnight Robber, Trinidad's answer to Robin Hood. But after her father commits a deadly crime, he flees with her to the brutal New Half Way Tree, a planet inhabited by violent human outcasts and monstrous creatures known only through folklore. Here, Tan-Tan is forced to reach into the heart of myth and become the legendary heroine herself, for only the Robber Queen's powers can save Tan-Tan from such a savage world.

Mama Day by Gloria Naylor

The bestselling new novel from the American Book Award-winning author is set in a world that is timeless yet indelibly authentic - the Georgia sea island of Willow Springs, where people still practice herbal medicine and honor ancestors who came over as slaves. On Willow Springs lives Mama Day, a matriarch who can call up lightning storms and see secrets in her dreams. But all of Mama Day’s powers are tested by her great-niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman whose life and very soul are now in danger from the island’s darker forces. Mama Day is a powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense.

The New Moon's Arms

When checking out one of my review assignments for Armchair Interviews, I stumbled upon this wonderful novel and promptly requested a review copy. There's so much in this book that I had a hard time writing a review within the given parameters. The following is taken from a wordy draft of the review. You can read the full and final review at Armchair Interviews...

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

53-year-old Calamity Lambkin's life seems to be coming loose at the seams. Beginning "the change of life" and grappling with the loss of the father that she nursed for the past two years, she is amazed when pieces of her past begin to materialize out of thin air. With the onset of menopause, Calamity seems to have reawakened the "finding" gift she had as a youth. Only now, the lost items come to her – everything from her favorite stuffed animal, which literally falls from the sky landing on her head, to her father’s cashew grove, which appears one evening in the yard of her new home.

Things become even more complicated when Calamity begins to look into her father’s past and when she finds a mysterious 3-year-old boy, who she suspects to be one of the sea people, washed up on the beach. She cares for him like her own son, causing a number of problems with her own grown daughter and young grandson.

A fiercely independent woman, the novel’s protagonist became a single mom at age sixteen. As an adult she eschewed her given name Chastity, for Calamity, a name she insists everyone from the local minister to her own daughter use. A very real character, Calamity is fraught with imperfections: she is honest to a fault, she curses like a sailor, and she’s unknowingly cultivated a hard heart caused by being in love with a man she can never have.

Set in the lush West Indies and imbued with their culture, The New Moon's Arms is a mesmerizing book. Hopkinson deftly handles both the mystery of the sea people and the anomaly of the local Mediterranean monk seals, adding both fantastical and historical elements to the mysteries.