(Reviewed by JD Jung)
“If Satan is successful, the family’s history will end with the blue baby girl.”
It is currently 2008, and Blue (referenced above) is grieving the murder of her daughter. She questions God’s existence, which leads her to travel from her home in Houston south to The Ranch, a retreat run by a Catholic order that was exiled from Rome over one hundred years ago. She feels that she’s been here before, though she’s sure she hasn’t. In any event, she is seeking answers to her life.
1848 at a party in New Orleans, one attendee, Palmer is seeking revenge for the man who sold his father into slavery. Another guest, Amanda, challenges the hostess, Ismay, to a social experiment which will affect generations. Ismay, who is a daughter of a slave and an aristocrat, cannot understand why slaves and free men cannot escape their dire circumstances of bondage and poverty. Will her beliefs eventually change?
Amanda is aware of a curse that will plague her family for generations. Can she break it? Her magical abilities as a shapeshifter and puzzle maker help her through this journey to change the seemingly inevitable.
Throughout this novel, we meet famous nineteenth century people, such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, anthropologist Johann Kant, and French Catholic priest Eugène de Mazenod.
You may question how these two stories over a century apart relate to one another, but they will all come together as we travel between the two time periods and in between throughout the book.
Though I am not generally a fan of this genre of magical realism, this book is an exception. The elements of folklore and mysticism enhance the storyline. We learn about the role of class within race in the pre-Civil War South. More importantly, we are reminded of the effects of slavery throughout later generations, as well as the intolerance of those who maintain that everyone can pull themselves up no matter what their circumstances. This is one I just couldn’t put down.
