Review: Brown Girl in the Ring

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Spoilers follow in this review.

Set in a near-future dystopian Canada among a community of largely Caribbean-descended people in a world where obeah and related magics exist, this novel is definitely something new. I'd been meaning to read it for a while, so maybe I built up too much anticipation, but even the somewhat novel (in terms of Western speculative fiction publishing) ideas were not enough to keep me truly engaged in this story. Ti-Jeanne has a baby with a local low-level gang member, Tony, and moves back in with her healer grandmother, Gros-Jeanne. Through heavy info-dumps and very unsubtle world-building we start to see that some kind of Riots have destroyed Toronto, that Ti-Jeanne's mother disappeared during those Riots, and that magic runs in Ti-Jeanne's family. Tony is sent by the head of his gang to find a person to kill in order to get their heart as an organ donation, and when he decides he wants out, he turns to Gros-Jeanne, who is known in the community as both a benevolent magic-wielder and healer. The gang leader, Rudy, is also clearly working magic to suit his own more nefarious desires. The set-up, while clunky, prepares the reader for an interesting story, but it turns out to be fairly trope-y, tripe-y, and uneven. Apparently, the only magic-wielders - heck, most of the characters - in this world belong to Ti-Jeanne's family, as Rudy turns out to secretly be her grandfather, and the crazy woman on the street that Ti-Jeanne has seen every day is secretly her somehow-unrecognized mother, and her baby houses the reborn spirit of her step-grandfather (though how that last reveal is related to the plot, I don't know). Because of the indelicate info-dumps throughout the story, I felt the whole way through that I was still not past the exposition. I also felt that none of the characters had a consistent personality or motivation - early in the novel, Ti-Jeanne's grandmother tells her, basically "I'm not helping Tony for you, I'm doing it cuz I want him gone" and then three pages later says "I'm only helping him for you."

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