The Book of Night Women
Ratings4
Average rating4.8
15
Ratings4
Average rating4.8
From a young writer who radiates charisma and talent comes a sweeping, stylish historical novel of Jamaican slavery that can be compared only to Toni Morrison's Beloved.The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel—a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling—that tells the story of a young slave woman on a sugar plantation in Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century, revealing a world and a culture that is both familiar and entirely new. Lilith is born into slavery, and even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they—and she— will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been conspiring to stage a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to and—as she reveals the extent of her power and begins to understand her own desires and feelings—potentially the weak link in their plans.Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion— between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to recently grace the page—and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most suspenseful, satisfying mysteries.The real revelation of the book—the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose—is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once wholly in command of his craft and breathtakingly daring, spinning his magical web of humanity, race, and love, fully inhabiting the incredibly rich nineteenth-century Jamaican patois that rings with a distinctly contemporary energy.
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My hurried, inadequate review: The harrowing story of a slave called Lilith on a Jamaican sugar cane plantation in the late 18th century. The story is told in the 3rd person in Jamaican patois, and you don't find out until the very end who the narrator is, when it really packs a punch.
Lilith's story is of a young woman with no family that she knows of (at first), at the mercy of a brutal institution and people who don't believe she is fully human, coming to find a place for herself in the world. Her relationships with fellow slaves are prickly, even with the people she feels sympathy for. The terrible things that happen to people around her make you aware that it is not safe for anyone to be too vulnerable. Lilith also seems to have a knack for self protection. People who try to harm her come to bad ends of various kinds.
When Lilith finally does encounter someone who wants to be kind to her, it is a tainted (and doomed) relationship. It develops in the midst of planning a slave rebellion which is then violently put down. Through the rebellion and the cruel punishment that came after, Lilith seems to find a place for herself to exist between enslaved blacks and free but brutal and depraved whites.
I loved this book because of how complicated Lilith and her world were. White overseers could father children with slaves and not see them as people to care about. Lilith could long for love but be prevented from living it out because of her social situation. The uneasiness in this book seemed real–people were living in a mess.
