March 15, 2023
An intergenerational examination of trauma, legacy, magic, and memory in the Black American experience. This novel opens with an appalling act. Tsitra, a young mother living in Detroit, is hacked to death by her infant son's grandmother in a misguided attempt to provoke radical change. Thousands of miles away, in Texas, the pain of losing her daughter puts Tsitra's mother, Blue, into a kind of suspended animation for 18 months. When she emerges, she travels to The Ranch--"a little-known silent retreat center in the Texas desert run by a Catholic order"--hoping to find some enlightenment. Instead, she arrives at a "zero-point energy field," a place of tremendous power designed by her shape-shifting ancestor, Amanda, to facilitate Blue's rebirth and the cleansing of the family line from the wasting curse of poverty. As Blue's seven-day stay at The Ranch progresses, her narrative is spliced with the story of her lineage as it runs through the brutal legacies of American slavery--her mother, who was raised in pitiless cycles of abuse; her father, who escaped a Mississippi lynch mob; her grandmother Amanda, whose magic powers descend from her own enslaved mother. Meanwhile, another tale unspools involving the powerful Amanda and the haughty Creole woman Ismay, who meet in 1848 and seek to understand the legacy of race for both their ancestors and progeny through a complicated equation of time travel and magical identity theft. Though this summary is dauntingly complex, it's only a sample of this ambitious novel's many convolutions. The central theme of the book is the devastating impact wrought upon a people who have been stripped of their cultural history--"The worst thing that slavery did for [its] victims...was the rewrite of their story," Amanda says. "Slaveholders only passed down stories of misery, ineptitude, and failure. This erasure wrecked us." This message could not come at a more pertinent time in the U.S., where the forced erasure of Black history and identity is once again seen as an acceptable strategy in governance. Unfortunately, in spite of its laudable intentions, the novel combines an unwieldy plot with a marked tendency to rely on exposition that, even in the mouths of well-realized characters, sounds more like an academic lecture than dialogue any character--even an all-knowing one--would utter. Ambitious and thematically important, if convoluted.
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