TELL MY HORSE: Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, comes with cover blurbs from Octavia Butler and Tim Powers; and if you like either of those authors, you should definitely check it out. It’s set in a future-Toronto urban wasteland, with goats cropping grass in the parks and feral children living in the subways. A Caribbean-Canadian mother and daughter fight to save the daughter’s lover from the clutches of the local gang kingpin, with the equivocal help of the orishas, the spirits of syncretic Afro-Western religion.

This book is so refreshing. I could listen to these characters talk all day long. They behave like actual people I’ve known from roughly-similar backgrounds: The flaws are as recognizable as the strengths. The love and resentment feel completely real. I will be bitter enough to add that the genre is also neither urban fantasy (aka pasty-faced pseudo-Celtic) nor magical realism (aka sentimental spilt-religion), but instead pretty much what I have been missing in both genres. There’s also a recurring theme of conflicted or unknown paternity, which of course I found really compelling.

This is fantasy of salvage, where the losses have real impact on both the characters and the reader. People make really horrible decisions, and then don’t conveniently die; they have to be lived with, and they have to learn to live with themselves.

There are some flaws. The ending includes a bit of policy-wonkery which I think is intended to be egalitarian (and needs to be egalitarian to function symbolically in the novel) but which is… not, really. There’s a related Afterschool Special bit in which the line, “Excuse my bluntness, [Previously Amoral Character], but when did you develop a social conscience?” is used without irony, which is just teeth-grittingly painful.

There’s an overreliance on “she just knew, and acted on instinct,” which seems to be a deliberate philosophical choice on Hopkinson’s part but which made it hard for me as a reader to relate, since it denies the pleasure of coming up with what you hope the characters will do and then being surprised when your own expectations are surpassed, or watching their thought processes and then being devastated when a plan you understood turns out to be useless. I can’t think with a character who is deliberately rejecting thinking, you know? And I can’t even really feel with her either, not in the moment in which she’s ascertaining where her instinct leads her. It makes the character’s actions feel deus ex machina and/or random.

Those points aside, though, this was a suspenseful read, brimming with ideas and unexpected twists on traditional imagery. I’ll definitely be looking out for more by Hopkinson.