Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. We’re still experimenting with the format, so just like last month, this month we’re just doing a review followed by your discussion in the comments!
Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)
Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Pages: 270 (Kindle)
Publisher: Aspect
Why I nominated it for book club: This month is Black History Month, and it occurred to me that a good way to mark that occasion would be to nominate only speculative fiction books by black authors. So that’s what I did, and here we are.
Premise:
The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways — farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.
This book club discussion does assume you have read and finished the book. If you want to avoid spoilers, please finish reading before continuing!
Discussion: Where to EVEN START with this one, I don’t know. I just finished it prior to sitting down to write this review and I’m still crying a little about it. It was such a powerful story about maintaining your cultural identity and embracing your roots and the beliefs and traditions of your family. It was really just a beautiful book in a lot of ways.
She dared not put her nose to it; like everything that Tony had ever given her, this gift had thorns. (Location 892, Kindle)
I want to start by talking about the end, because that’s the part I really connected with the most. At the start of the novel, Ti-Jeanne is an angry young woman that resented her baby for needing her, her grandmother for trying to make her learn the old ways, and her mother for abandoning her. She’s just a hard heart at the beginning. And it’s by softening her heart, by embracing the things that she’d pushed away for so long, that she is finally able, at the end, to save herself.
Hesitantly she said to the Jab-Jab, “I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself.” No answer. It wasn’t going to tell her. (Location 2637, Kindle)
It’s so important to me, that she saved herself, that she called upon the spirits on her own, and that she walked into Rudy’s high rise by herself. I love the power and strength inherent in that moment of connection with the spirits, in connecting herself to her mother and her grandmother, these strong women she had known, who had failed in their own ways but kept going. And that, in the end, the thing that actually killed Rudy wasn’t Ti-Jeanne but the weight of all of the souls of the people he’d killed. His own past and his sins catching up with him.
All of this is not to say, by the way, that I was completely into every single moment. This book was a lot gorier than I truly expected, and I could have done without the descriptions of someone being skinned alive. Were those moments truly necessary? I don’t know, but I do feel like it gave her courage at the end to go and face Rudy more weight, and left me with the feeling that literally anything could happen.
“Is okay, Papa Osain, thank you,” Ti-Jeanne told him, a little surprised at her own audacity. “I think you start the healing good already. I could do the rest myself.” (Location 2732, Kindle)
The hardest part for me to get used to was the way the dialogue was written, but once I got the cadence of it, I really liked it. There was no way to read that in my own voice. It was just so clear who these women were and what they were like, it really helped me get their characters and their stories.
“Gros-Jeanne woulda tell you that all she doing is serving the spirits. And that anybody who try to live good, who try to help people who need it, who try to have respect for life, and age, and those who go before, them all doing the same thing: serving the spirits.” (Location 2616, Kindle)
In the end, I think what will stick most with me is the sense of hope the book ends with, for all that it was so dark and bleak towards the middle. Ti-Jeanne lost a lot but gained even more, and in the end is content with her connection to her past through her mother and her hope for the future in her son.
In conclusion: I’m just really glad this book exists, that this kind of powerful book about finding the strength to save yourself exists in this world for anyone to read. I’m definitely going to buy myself a copy so I can lend it out.
I have had a copy of this book on my bookshelf, unread, since shortly after it was first published. I am grateful for the push to get it off my shelf and read it.
I loved the setting, with the Caribbean-influenced dialogue and culture. I loved how the spirits that Ti-Jeanne and Gros-Jeanne talk to are involved in the progression of the plot. I enjoyed the relationship between Ti-Jeanne and her grandmother. I did not have much use for Tony and I have some problems believing that Ti-Jeanne would get back involved with him.
I’ve heard that Nalo Hopkinson sees failings in this book as she’s gotten more experience with writing, but she says this book really hit a chord with people and it remains her best-known book.
Re: believing that Ti-Jeanne would get involved with Tony again: I believe it. People make bone-headed decisions when it comes to love, they go back to people who are terrible for them all the time. I think, in some ways, it was part of Ti-Jeanne not being ready, not believing in herself, not connecting enough with her past, that allowed her to believe Tony’s lies again.
I’m glad this book was picked for book club because I don’t think I ever would have found it on my own. I was surprised that a book about Afro-Caribbean magic was set in Toronto. I wished that some of the terms had been defined better because it took me a while to figure out what a duppy was. I did find Ti-Jeanne to be annoyingly passive at times but I did like the relationship between her and her grandmother. I also liked the street kids and wished that the story had focused on them more. I definitely did not want Ti-Jeanne to get back together with Tony, so in my version of what happens after the book ends, she never forgives him.
I don’t mind her forgiving him in the end, because I don’t think it’s a precursor to her getting back together with him, but I do think it’s an important step on her spiritual journey, if that makes sense.
Definitely something that I, too, would not have found for myself. Although my mom popped up at one point and was all, “Hey I know that author.” Apparently she’d read The New Moon’s Arms a while ago.
Anywho, it was definitely different and I was into it, although the dialect I was never quite able to grasp. I think it’s because I’ve never heard anything like it spoken aloud and for whatever reason could never make it work in my brain. It’s not that I didn’t understand it – I just never got it to flow very well.
I’m with Kelly in that in my version she never gets with Tony because even if he 100% fixes up his life, their togetherness is OVER. She can forgive him, that’s up to her, but no way should Ti-Jeanne be with him. To me, she essentially became a woman, and even though Tony’s realized what he’s done and so forth, he’s still a manchild that needs to get his shit together. I do also wish a lot of terms were better defined because a lot of them got chucked out there without context – I’m still not completely sure what “obeah” means. I got that it was bad, but that was it. I was reading and wondering, “Is that a French term? Slang? A real word? Fake word?” Same with duppy. No idea until far, far into the book.
I do have to say though – I am a *massive* fan of the Jab-Jab/Legbara. I love cheeky tricksy spirits. Oh, and weird thing – when she was having that vision and the Jab-Jab threw rice on the ground so the other spirit had to count it, I kind of spazzed and thought, “I know that spirit!” (the rice-counting one). Although for the life of me I can’t remember what the one I’d heard of is called…
[…] this book took me on. The fantasy part of it reminded me a lot of the parts that I really liked in Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson, which we read for Book Club last February. It had the same Creole belief system […]