The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Told from the point of view of three black women who are each in a different point in history, along with a goddess who inhabits each of them at various times, but not in chronological order.
We are taken to a plantation in 1804, where Mer is a slave who has is looked to for healing and midwifery, to Jeanne who is described as ‘ginger-coloured woman’, a dancer on stage and mistress to a poet, Charles Baudelaire in France in 1880s, and the third is Meritet, a half Greek, half Nubian slave who works in a tavern as a prostitute in 345 CE. The goddess who inhabits them is Ezilli, and she is searching for understanding of what she is, and what is happening.
I’ve seen a description of this book as fantasy folk-lore, and I think that’s a very good description! The author has been described as unashamedly sensual, and this is evident in Salt Roads, with sex scenes between Mer and her female lover and Jeanne and Charles, and saying any more would spoil the story!
I thought this was really interesting, and as I feel like I say with a lot of Sword and Laser books, not one I would probably have picked up on my own, but I enjoyed it.
