The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts: A Novel
Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award "Mothers never die. Children love to resurrect us in they stories." Folktales and spirits animate this lively and unforgettable coming-of-age tale of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn grappling with their mother's illness, their father's infidelity, and the truth of their family's past Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father's violence and their mother's worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home. But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know--and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi's. Telling of the love between sisters who don't always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?
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Community Reviews
🌺 The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer
I started reading The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts over a month ago when I started to get overtaken by an unwanted reading slump. I was frustrated because I was on a roll, and slumps do nothing but slow things down. But, what I enjoyed most about pushing through, albeit slowly, is the story has substance. While reading, the saying the family who prays together stays together came to mind as Sasha, Zora, and their parents bond over folklore. The folklore is a mix of truth and fairy tale mixed in a concoction of the glue that holds together a broken family.
The storyline reeled me in when Zora referred to the Anansi stories as she worked to figure out ways to save her mother from the metastasizing skin cancer in her brain. Beatrice left to go to Trinidad to get healed from her 104-year-old great-grandmother. At the same time, Zora’s anxiety heightens as she pulls her sister along with trying to conjure their mother back from Trinidad healed. Conjuring ancestral magic is something that many people shy away from because it’s in opposition of our roots as Christianized Black Americans, and that’s what I enjoy most about reading books across the diaspora - experiencing the magic is magnificent.
Readers who’ve enjoyed books like Zora Neale Hurston’s collection Every Tongue Has Got To Confess or Maisy Card’s These Ghosts Are Family will also enjoy Soraya Palmer’s debut novel. It’s one to be added to your list, even if you haven't read the former.
Shonda Moore
Moderator
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