Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

Brown Girl in the Ring

4/5. A story of family and crime and survival in a sort of post apocalypse Toronto, all flavored with afro-caribbean mythology.

Of course I’d heard about this book for years and years before reading it. What I heard: great writing, rich own voices fantasy, just plain good. Correct, correct, and correct. But I spent most of this book occupied by its exploration of intergenerational trauma. Four generations, from an infant to an old matriarch, and how they fail their children and how they don’t and how useless men are. This book lets it all be terribly messy and textured and real, in that way where mothers are incredibly sympathetic and deeply unsympathetic at the same time. That’s good stuff.

I am worried about the quality of the audiobook narration on other books of hers, though, which I hear lean even more heavily into the dialect.

Content notes: Violence, torture, possession, organ harvesting.