Madam Fate

Nora Krug

...Douglas writes from the heart....a story of maternal sacrifice...
—New York Times Book Review

Library Journal

Douglas has written a dandy, atmospheric novel of women's connections to the spirit world and to one another. Set in Jamaica, the story is steeped in a rich amalgam of Ashanti, Afro-Cuban, voodoo, and other folk traditions and the incantations, charms, and symbols associated with them. The women narrators, all of whom are connected by "the laughter like beads on a string," call forth reserves of strength and fearlessness despite the odds against them. They're also intimately connected by their hypersensitivity to elements of the natural world. As each narrator evokes the voice of a previous narrator while adding to the tale, all of the stories intertwine: Bella narrates Jamaica's creation story; Ida resides in an asylum called the Garden; and Claudia visits the asylum in search of the mother who abandoned her as an infant. Some readers may stumble over the book's vernacular and phrasing, but it is well worth the effort to try to grasp both. A story that tickles the senses and delights the imagination.--Lisa S. Nussbaum, Euclid P.L., OH

Nora Krug

...Douglas writes from the heart....a story of maternal sacrifice... -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A lyrical evocation of Jamaican women's lives makes this debut, indebted to myth and magical realism, more prose poem than fully realized novel. Douglas ambitiously attempts both a history and a present-tense accounting of life for island women over the whole span beginning with the time of slavery. A range of narrators helps out. They include Bella, a protean figure who at will assumes varying identities; Ida, an old woman hospitalized at the Garden, a local asylum; Claudia, a teacher looking for her real mother; Muriel, gone to work in New York; and her teenage daughter Gracie, left behind in Jamaica. These voices are interwoven like the hardy strands in a basket, but something's too calculated and predictable in the stories that are told. Emphasizing evocation more than action, the novelist relies on tired ethnic and feminist icons—wronged women (Gracie is raped by a neighbor); herbal remedies (Madam Fate is a plant that cures all ills); crafts (Idans a skilled carver of calabashes); and a female Creator (disturbed by a vision of slave ships, she created Jamaica). Ida, born with a limp, recalls a childhood marred by her deformity, her marriage, her three dead babies, and by the voices—of dead slaves and lost souls—she hears in her special calabash. Muriel, cleaning offices in New York, writes to Gracie describing her difficult life there and her past as a prostitute. Gracie, missing her mother, befriends an old woman, who asks her to look for the magical Madam Fate plant. Claudia continues her search for the mother who abandoned her at birth, and Bella has cameo appearances as a voice from the past. No resolutions, just a cumulatively patchy portrait of womenstruggling to survive. Carefully wrought prose that never really resonates.