Fantasy Fiction, Caribbean Fiction, Other Science Fiction Categories

The Salt Roads

Name: The Salt Roads
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN: 9780446677134

by Nalo Hopkinson

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Overview

- The Salt Roads was published in Warner hardcover (0-446-53302-5) in 11/03 and received rave reviews.
- Nalo Hopkinson made her debut with Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), winning the Aspect First Novel Contest and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
- The author's previous book, Skin Folk (Aspect, 2001), won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, was named Recommended Fiction for 2002 by Black Issues Book Review, and was named a New York Times Best book of the Year. Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (Aspect, 2000), a New York Times Recommended Book of Summer 2000, received an Honorable Mention for the Casa de las Americas Prize. It was a finalist for the Nubula Award for Best Novel, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award.

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

Whirling with witchcraft and sensuality, this latest novel by Hopkinson (Skin Folk; Midnight Robber) is a globe-spanning, time-traveling spiritual odyssey. When three Caribbean slave women, led by dignified doctress Mer, assemble to bury a stillborn baby on the island of Saint Domingue (just before it is renamed Haiti in 1804), Ezili, the Afro-Caribbean goddess of love and sex, is called up by their prayers and lamentations. Drawing from the deceased infant's "unused vitality," Ezili inhabits the bodies of a number of women who, despite their remoteness from each other in time and space, are bound to each other by salt-be it the salt of tears or the salt that baptized slaves into an alien religion. The goddess's most frequent vehicle is Jeanne Duval, a 19th-century mulatto French entertainer who has a long-running affair with bohemian poet Charles Baudelaire. There is also fourth-century Nubian prostitute Meritet, who leaves a house of ill repute to follow a horde of sailors, but finds religion and a call to sainthood. Meanwhile, the seed of revolution is planted in Saint Domingue as the slaves hatch a plan to bring down their white masters. Ezili yearns to break free from Jeanne's body to act elsewhere, but can do so only when Jeanne, now infected with syphilis, is deep in dreams. Fearing that she will disappear when death finally calls Jeanne, Ezili is drawn into the body of Mer at a cataclysmic moment and is just as quickly tossed back into other narratives. Though occasionally overwrought, the novel has a genuine vitality and generosity. Epic and frenetic, it traces the physical and spiritual ties that bind its characters to each other and to the earth. (Nov. 12) Forecast: Hopkinson's sci-fi and fantasy following should give this novel crossover appeal, and African-American markets are a good bet, too. 10-city author tour. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

This blend of historical fiction, fantasy, and folklore intertwines the lives of three women of African descent: Mer, a slave on a Caribbean sugar plantation; Jeanne Duval, mistress of poet Charles Baudelaire; and Meritet, a prostitute who becomes St. Mary of Egypt. These women share a connection to Ezili (the Afro-Caribbean goddess of love and sex), who inhabits their minds and, whenever possible, influences their decisions. None of the women has a simple life, but the share of violence, bitterness, and sadness in each is balanced by joyful sensuality. Nor are there any tidy endings to their stories; their lives, and deaths, are as rich and complicated as those of real people. The mortal women are compellingly portrayed with telling historical details and distinct voices. Ezili remains indistinct, as befits a goddess, and Hopkinson sometimes abandons straight narrative for poetry when Ezili speaks. Though the goddess connects the three women together, the women's tales themselves are much more interesting. Hopkinson has won several awards for her imaginative sf (Brown Girl in a Ring; Midnight Robber), which incorporates Afro-Caribbean mythology and folktales. Her latest book is a move out of that genre into magical realism. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/03; see "Must-Reads for Fall," p. 36.-Ed.]-Devon Thomas, Hass MS&L, Ann Arbor, MI Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Historical fantasy with a strong erotic element from the Locus award-winning author. Hopkinson (Skin Folk, 2001, etc.) tells her story through the eyes of three women: Auntie Mer, a slave in French-colonial Haiti; Jeanne DuVal (LeMer), the black mistress of Charles Baudelaire; and Meritet, a Nubian prostitute in the Alexandria of a.d. 400. The three women are linked by Ezili, one of the love goddesses (or the lwa, to use the name their worshippers call them) of the voodoo pantheon, who travels across time to possess each of the three. The greatest tension exists in Auntie Mer's story, where the seeds are planted that will eventually result in the revolution freeing Haiti's slaves. The remnants of African religion-ruthlessly suppressed by the slave owners-are kept alive in secret midnight meetings, where the spirits of the lwa take human bodies to serve as their steeds. Jeanne DuVal preserves some of the memory of these deep African roots, which her French contemporaries consider as primitive, earthy, and exotic, an attitude underscored by quotations from Baudelaire's poems. Meanwhile, fifteen hundred years earlier, as the result of a comic series of misunderstandings, Meritet makes a journey from Alexandria to Jerusalem, ending up as an oddball saint of the new religion that will eventually become part of the mechanism of slavery in Haiti. Tied together somehow by Ezili, the three stories eventually coalesce into a centuries-spanning panorama of the cultural collision between Africa and Europe. Hopkinson renders the societies she portrays with careful attention to everyday details: the bustling brothel where Meritet works; the fearsome conditions of slavery on the sugar cane plantations;the decadent demimonde of Baudelaire's Paris. Sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic. A tour de force from one of our most striking new voices in fiction. Author tour