2014 read #63: Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
250 pages
Published 1998
Read from July 2 to July 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

With the idea of imposing some method on my reading selections, I've begun ILLing books from this Buzzfeed quiz purporting to list some ninety-nine "classics of science fiction." I'd read only thirty-four of them before now, obviously an unacceptable state of affairs.

It took me a while to get into this book. It was published after winning a contest run by the Warner Aspect imprint during the last hurrah of the publishing industry, and without having any other such novels to point to, nonetheless I feel safe saying it feels like a novel that won a contest. Or rather, I should say it feels like someone's first novel. The central character thinks about her past while walking through her neighborhood, establishing geography and necessary backstory with as much subtlety as a cardboard background in a high school play. The book lacks polish, and the storytelling lacks daring; perhaps I've read too much high literary work recently to see standard sci-fi narration as anything other than rigid and over-deliberate. Worst of all, the backstory laid out so carefully in the opening chapters is a mess of 1990s cliches and 1990s concerns. Toronto has become a failed city, brought low and abandoned to the poor after a First Nations lawsuit leads to international sanctions powerful enough to cripple a First World economy! There's a wicked new street drug! There's a literal underground society of street urchins! Squatters live in a mall whose generator is somehow still running twelve years after the Collapse! There's illegal organ harvesting! There's a wicked new virus entering the population! Animal rights activists somehow make up a substantial portion of the electorate! Hopkinson's post-collapse Canada never feels coherent, pieced together from then-fashionable concerns.

About a hundred pages in, though, Brown Girl abruptly becomes interesting. Two words: Orisha possession. The music of Exuma got me interested in West African religion and the syncretic beliefs of the Diaspora, and like well-done stories of Faery and Old Weird Americana, I eat it up. The problem, of course, is there's a vast wealth of Faery and a respectable amount of Old Weird Americana, but hardly any Orisha-based fantasy literature, at least that I've seen around. (I hadn't heard of Brown Girl until I took the Buzzfeed quiz, so it's evident my background was not conducive to exposing me to such stories.) However shaky the dystopian worldbuilding and however methodical the plotting, Hopkinson excels when the Orishas take a direct hand in moving the story along. Brown Girl still has its flaws, as any first novel would, but this is balanced somewhat by the delight of its later imagery.