3.5
The Salt Roads
ByPublisher Description
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
, 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).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Salt Roads Reviews
3.5
“Beautiful writing but by page 75 I still didn’t care for anything that was happening and I barely could make out what was going on …: but by this time I just didn’t care. Might try at another time.”
About Nalo Hopkinson
was born in Jamaica and has lived in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. The daughter of a poet/playwright and a library technician, she has won numerous awards including the John W. Campbell Award, the World Fantasy Award, and Canada's Sunburst Award for literature of the fantastic. Her award-winning short fiction collection
was selected for the 2002
Summer Reading List and was one of the
Best Books of the Year. Hopkinson is also the author of
and
. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and splits her time between California, USA, and Toronto, Canada.
Other books by Nalo Hopkinson
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