The Salt Roads
From AwardAnnals
| This creative work has a long or truncated description. Please review the creative work guidelines concerning descriptions and edit down or replace the description. |
 | |
| Author(s) | Nalo Hopkinson |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Warner Books |
| Honors | |
| Jeanne Duval, the ginger-colored entertainer, is descended from African slaves and white sailors. It is twilight, and she argues with her lover Charles Baudelaire in his Paris apartment. Ginger is hot in its roots with a beautiful, lush red flower above. And ginger has a bite as she does…
Mer, plantation slave and doctor, has healing hands though her spirit is sickened. She both hungers for and dreads liberation, and longs for the gods to take her home. My wishes can’t fly freely. They’re rooted to the ground like me, who eats salt. Thais, a beauty from… | |
Jeanne Duval, the ginger-colored entertainer, is descended from African slaves and white sailors. It is twilight, and she argues with her lover Charles Baudelaire in his Paris apartment. Ginger is hot in its roots with a beautiful, lush red flower above. And ginger has a bite as she does…
Mer, plantation slave and doctor, has healing hands though her spirit is sickened. She both hungers for and dreads liberation, and longs for the gods to take her home. My wishes can’t fly freely. They’re rooted to the ground like me, who eats salt.
Thais, a beauty from Alexandria, was sold into slavery and prostitution as a girl. Impelled to seek a glorious revelation, she will travel the long hot roads to Jerusalem. She is dark-skinned, this beauty, and ruddy like copper. No salt-pucker of bitterness in her.
Ezili. Born from hope vibrant and hope destroyed. Born of bitter experience. Born of wishing for better. Born.
Across centuries and civilizations, award-winning writer Nalo Hopkinson fearlessly explores the relationships women have with their lovers, with each other, with their people, and with the divine. As Jeanne struggles with the volatile Baudelaire, as Mer’s dedication is tested by revolution, as Thais crosses paths with the eternal, the author interweaves their experiences and braids vivid acts of brutality with passionate unions of spirit and flesh. The result is a brilliantly imagined tale of sexuality, freedom, and transcendence from one of today’s most original authors - a narrative poured forth from deep within the heart and soul.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
In beautiful prose, Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads tells how Ezili, the African goddess of love, becomes entangled in the lives of three women. Grief-powered prayers draw Ezili into the physical world, where she finds herself trapped by her lost memories and by the spiritual effects of the widespread evil of slavery. Her consciousness alternates among the bodies/minds of several women throughout time, but she resides mostly in three women: Mer, an Afro-Caribbean slave woman/midwife; Jeanne Duval, Afro-French lover of decadent Paris poet Charles Baudelaire; and Meritet, the Greek-Nubian slave/prostitute known to history as St. Mary of Egypt.
Ezili becomes entangled with Mer because the midwife’s prayers helped draw her into the mortal world. The novel presents a reasonable, though undeveloped, connection between Meritet/St. Mary, the Virgin Mary, and the goddesses of Africa. However, it’s not clear why Ezili becomes entangled with Jeanne Duval. This is because The Salt Roads is sketchy, its three storylines compressed; the novel reads more like three novellas incompletely braided. This is a shame, because each mortal character’s life could have made a fine, full, fascinating novel by itself.
John W. Campbell Award winner Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel, the New York Times Notable Book Midnight Robber, was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and James Tiptree Jr. Awards. The Salt Roads is her third novel. —Cynthia Ward
