Nalo Hopkinson

Brought into being by the lamentations of three Caribbean slave women, a powerful deity begins a desperate search to discover herself and inhabits the minds of such women as a the seductive mistress of nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire and a Nubian prostitute on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 300 A.D. Reprint.

The Salt Roads

Pam Sartain

Told from the point of view of three black women who are each in a different point in history, along with a goddess who inhabits each of them at various times, but not in chronological order. 

We are taken to a plantation in 1804, where Mer is a slave who has is looked to for healing and midwifery, to Jeanne who is described as 'ginger-coloured woman', a dancer on stage and mistress to a poet, Charles Baudelaire in France in 1880s, and the third is Meritet, a half Greek, half Nubian slave who works in a tavern as a prostitute in 345 CE. The goddess who inhabits them is Ezilli, and she is searching for understanding of what she is, and what is happening.

I've seen a description of this book as fantasy folk-lore, and I think that's a very good description! The author has been described as unashamedly sensual, and this is evident in Salt Roads, with sex scenes between Mer and her female lover and Jeanne and Charles, and saying any more would spoil the story!

I thought this was really interesting, and as I feel like I say with a lot of Sword and Laser books, not one I would probably have picked up on my own, but I enjoyed it.

Lindy

Cat Josephson

Nebula Award Finalist: This “sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic . . . tour de force” blends fantasy, folklore, and the history of women and slavery (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women’s lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant’s “unused vitality” to draw Ezili—the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love—into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife’s body—as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria. Bound together by Ezili and “the salt road” of their sweat, blood, and tears, the three women struggle against a hostile world, unaware of the goddess’s presence in their lives. Despite her magic, Mer suffers as a slave on a sugar plantation until Ezili plants the seeds of uprising in her mind. Jeanne slowly succumbs to the ravages of age and syphilis when her lover is unable to escape his mother’s control. And Meritet, inspired by Ezili, flees her enslavement and makes a pilgrimage to Egypt, where she becomes known as Saint Mary. With unapologetically sensual prose, Nalo Hopkinson, the Nebula Award–winning author of Midnight Robber, explores slavery through the lives of three historical women touched by a goddess in this “electrifying bravura performance by one of our most important writers” (Junot Díaz).