In Saint Domingue prior to the revolution, a woman named Mer is a slave and doing her best as a healer for the people there, including her lover Tipingee, and Georgine who comes to her when she is pregnant. Georgine's baby is stillborn, but in the women's mourning for her an aspect of Ezili is born. Ezili has the ability to join her consciousness with other women, including Jeanne Duval, the mistress of Charles Baudelaire in 1840s Paris, and Thais, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in 300s Alexandria.

I enjoyed the writing and the characters, but didn't entirely get what Hopkinson was doing bringing these three narratives together. Any of them could have been expanded into a strong story of its own. Ezili - and I had to look this up while reading - is a pantheon of Vodou goddesses that show up in different aspects, so the connection to Haiti (Saint Domingue still in Mer's story) and salt (Jeanne's nickname is Lemer and Thais is also Meritet, and both the salt of the sea and the connection to the Virgin Mary come in to play) is played with throughout. Each of the stories are heartbreaking but also about the resilience and love of the three women. There's a fair amount of violence as you might expect from a book that deals with slavery, and also sex - several characters are queer, some of the sex is, well, sexy and some of it very much is not, but desire is not shied away from here. It had some interesting qualities, but even at the end I'm not entirely sure where the story was going. ( )

Intensely personal, rich in nuance. Women finding their places in the world.
Queer women. Cruelty to women. Slavery. Read it anyway.

I think I'm finally just going to call it on this title and move on. I've made two attempts to read it and I'm about halfway through at this point. I love the characters, time jumps, and connections between them but the plot just doesn't move enough for me. I never tend to like slice of life even when the lives are really interesting and this, despite the cool structure and lyrical style, just reads slice of life to me.

Hm. Interesting. Didn't realize until I was a ways into it that some of the characters were real people. ( )

I liked this a lot as separate tales, but what got me is I didn't feel like the separate threads worked together as a novel. I liked this more than the rating suggests but at the end I was like, "why are these stories together?" ( )