Althea M. (althea) reviewed on 9/11/2008 + 774 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 4

I think I was mostly disappointed by this book because I came to it with really high expectations - I'd read some great reviews of it, comparing Hopkinson favorably to Octavia Butler, etc.
Well, both writers are black and tend to write about black characters, but there the similarity ends.
This is a reasonably entertaining voodoo adventure story... a young Canadian woman of Caribbean descent, Ti-Jeanne, must take care of her baby, ditch the loser drug-addict boyfriend she's in love with, learn to work with the voodoo spirits, and defeat the gang leader who is running this near-future Toronto - a gang leader who just happens to be involved with evil voodoo - and is her grandfather.

That's all fine - and fun - but that's about as far as it goes. This is not great literature - the characters are all fairly one-dimensional, and it gets to be pretty annoying that ALL the women are strong, long-suffering, resourceful and good, and ALL the men are either weak and useless, or outright evil. The main villain is so evil as to be fairly unbelievable.

This was Hopkinson's first book, so I won't write her off completely, but I'm not planning on going out of my way to get more of her work.

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