It may be almost the end of March, but I didn’t want this month to pass by without talking about what I read last month. I didn’t read quite as much in February as I did in January, but I am happy to report that, with one exception that I’ll talk about in a future post, I stuck to my plan of finishing only Black-authored books last month. Some of them are new, but there’s at least one classic in the mix.
Unravelling by Karen Lord
This is a sequel to Redemption in Indigo, a book I read over a decade ago when Lord was first up for the John W. Campbell Award. I loved the deft characterization of Paama, the sensible protagonist, and the infusion of Senegalese folklore into the tale. Long-time readers may remember that I also read Lord’s novel The Best of All Possible Worlds almost a decade ago. So this is my third time reading her work.
Despite the presence of some of the same characters as Redemption in Indigo, this sequel is a vastly different work in tone, topic and writing style. Indigo was a humane fantasy with a charming, puckish sensibility. In contrast, the marketing copy for Unravelling makes it sound like a psychological thriller.
Dr. Miranda Ecouvo is a forensic psychologist in The City, a place where the moneyed elite with citizenship enjoy rights and privileges that the underclass, composed of migrants, refugees, orphans and child soldiers do not. She’s just finished an important and mystifying serial murder case where several members of the underclass were killed and had their body parts removed — but although the culprit was identified, it turns out that they were working on behalf of a larger power, whose plans are close to fruition. Miranda unknowingly finds herself in the middle of a dizzying maze of probabilities as various spirits and supernatural entities recruit her to figure out the truth.
I’m going to admit it: I admire this book more than I like it. For one thing, thrillers are not a genre I enjoy. For another, Miranda herself feels like a cipher throughout most of the story, just there to be told important information and be the everyperson that the other characters — the most important of whom are spirits who can see through time, space, and alternate realities — project their feelings onto. It’s like this for the first two parts of the book.
But the third? The third resembles nothing so much as a sort of Jungian dreamscape, where Miranda communes with the spirits of the murdered victims while occupying some sort of liminal, probabilistic space that’s actually functioning as a psychic trap for the true murderer. It resembles nothing so much as The Cell. Lord is really stretching in the final section, in interesting and wonderful ways. It feels like the first two parts were a perfunctory sort of setup for the final third, as if that’s the part she wanted to write from the get-go.
Raybearer and Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko
This duology has been the hardest set of books for me to summarize so far. It’s fun and compulsively readable; I read the both books back to back, each over a single day. Tarisai of Swana has been bred and raised for a single purpose: to show her smarts and skill in the court of Prince Ekundayo Kunleo and earn a place on his council. Once a councillor is chosen, Prince will form a protective telepathic bond with them called the Ray. Once the Prince has bestowed the Ray on a full council, he will be effectively immortal, and can die only at the hand of one of his chosen, or of old age. This is what Tarisai’s mother is counting on, because once Tarisai has formed this bond, she has been ordered to kill the prince — all this is part of a magical wish and curse her mother placed on her when she was conceived.
But Tarisai resents and fears this long-term plan. And once she learns more about the horrible pact that the first Kunleo emperor made hundreds of years ago to sacrifice children to the underworld in order to maintain power, she realizes that she must do everything she can to overturn this social order. It’s the only way to set the wrongs of the past right and prevent even more children from dying.
Here, you’ve got all the traditional YA fantasy tropes — royal courts, magical intrigue, love triangles, and a main character whose central drive is overturning systemic injustice. You’ve also got heady issues like dealing with parental abandonment and trauma, and a deliberate focus on centering the action in an Afrocentric setting and mythological space.
However, despite these pleasures, there were some real issues with how the second book paid off all the tension built up in the first book. In addition to some very noticeable continuity errors, the plot of the second book felt too rushed, and the whole thing felt too heavily YA-ish for me to ignore. And that’s fine! People are allowed to like YA, and to have fun both playing with and going against various YA tropes! But by the end, it just wasn’t for me.
Jazz by Toni Morrison
Is there really any point in trying to put my own analytical spin on the works of a Nobel prize winner? Morrison is a towering literary figure, so any critiques I could make about Jazz feel unnecessary. It’s a marvelously strung together work, full of tangents and digressions and unusual narration and psychological insights. Characters are given their full humanity despite doing cruel, non-sensical, arrogant, or heinous things, like murdering a young lover, or trying to steal a baby in broad daylight, or disrupting a funeral by attacking the corpse. Joe Trace did the first thing out of frustration and fear that Dorcas, his young affair partner, was going to leave him. His wife, Violet, did the last two things, out of a combination of misplaced, anger, jealousy and baby fever.
However, I can’t help but be frustrated by the final section, where we finally figure out who the narrator is and see all the plotlines tie together. Sure, Joe killed Dorcas, but then Felice shows up and tells both him and Violet that hey, Dorcas was actually kind of an awful person. I’m not really sure what Morrison’s intent was here. Are we supposed to be ok with the death of a young woman if it turns out that she was kind of toxic? Am I totally misreading the situation? But then again, Morrison isn’t meant to be easy, comforting reading.