The New Moon's Arms [Hardcover]

This is a fascinating book that you'll want to read in one sitting. A combination of fantasy, mystery, drama, humor and relationships, the author draws you in from the first chapter, as she recounts an embarrassing incident at a funeral. After all, who can stop reading a book that includes in its opening paragraphs a line like "Mrs. Winter had given up the attempt to discreetly pull her bloomers back up"?

Bloomers aside, by the time I reached page two, I realized from the language that not only was the setting in the Caribbean, but that most of the colloquial expressions were Guyanese. A background check revealed that Ms. Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, but that her famous father was a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor, and that she had once lived in Guyana with her family. A-ha! Case closed!

Set on the fictional islands of Dolorosse, Cayaba and Blessée to a lesser extent, the main character is a reluctant grandmother (in her early fifties) who has a hissy fit when her daughter calls her a matriarch or reveals any hints about her advancing age. Given the name "Chastity" at birth, she insists on being called "Calamity", and as a child had the ability to find lost things.

Several things happen in the story that bring about major changes in her life -

1. Her mother disappears without a trace
2. She gets pregnant at fifteen after an experimental encounter with a close friend
3. She has a close encounter of the strange kind with a girl of the sea. (As in Chicken of the Sea)
4. Her father passes away
5. Menopause
6. The return of the ability to find lost things.

Not one to let these things hold her back, Calamity continues to live her carefree dysfunctional life, barely making ends meet, when into her life come not one, but two younger men, and then to complicate matters further, in washes a young boy with the tide.

There's much more to tell in this fast-paced book, but I'll let you discover the twists and turns on your own. Suffice to say, it involves colorful language, myths and legends, the supernatural, alternative lifestyles, relationships, politics, extinct mammals and yes, the droopy bloomers.

One of the best books I've read in a while.

Amanda Richards, February 20, 2008

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson is a wonderfully imagined, page-turning offering that combines a bit of fantasy, mystery, and romance. Amid a Caribbean backdrop, the author delivers a story centered on a 53-year-old pistol, Chastity Lambkin, who is grieving the recent loss of her estranged father to lung cancer. She is a sprightly, independent library research assistant who is determined to avoid the matronly image and cling to her youth at all costs. She demands that everyone including her daughter, Ife, and grandson, Stanley, call her Calamity. She holds nothing back (including her tongue) which has caused a long-standing strained relationship with Ife. It is revealed fairly early in the novel that a portion of Calamity's angst resides in unresolved childhood issues and events including an untimely departure of her mother resulting in her father being arrested as a murder suspect in her disappearance when she was ten. Lost love and an unplanned pregnancy at fifteen resulted in her father's emotional, financial, and physical withdrawal from her at sixteen.

It is never a dull moment with Calamity. Try as she might, she is losing the battle with Mother Nature and with the encroaching onset of menopause, she reawakens a unique, repressed childhood gift to find lost things. This gift, which hilariously coincides with tingling fingers and hot flashes at the most inopportune moments, results in remnants from the past literally falling from the sky triggering a reemergence of forgotten and sometimes painful memories. Following her father's funeral, Calamity partakes in a drinking binge to wallow in self-pity on the nearby beach. She awakens to discover a "lost" child has washed ashore covered in seaweed. Careful medical examination by her childhood friend-turned- tormentor, Dr. Chow, confirms that the child is a bit "different;'" and deliberately suppresses her suspicions that he is one of the mythical Sea People. When two similar adult bodies are discovered the next day, Calamity identifies with the orphan's apparent parental loss. She names him Agway; embraces and welcomes him into her home worsening her frail relationship with Ife even more.

To complicate matters further, she is suddenly overwhelmed by life: Her new love suggests opening the unsolved cold case surrounding her mother's disappearance; Ife's marriage is in shambles spawned by arguments with her husband surrounding the upcoming election and the heated political factions facing the island's tourist trade; Ife's father, her first love, comes to visit and brings his new lover; Stanley needs her assistance to complete his school project; endangered, indigenous seals are missing from the local zoo; and last, caring for a rambunctious three-year-old "merboy" who loves to eat raw shrimp is putting her close to the edge!

It may sound a bit convoluted but it is not; the author does an excellent job of lacing the plot threads together and it all comes together beautifully. It is a delightful, endearing story about family, loss, and reclamation. I absolutely loved the infusion of humor, African Diasporatic themes, West Indian culture, language, history, and folklore into the story. This is one of my favorite reads so far this year.

Reviewed by Phyllis

APOOO BookClub

Nubian Circle Book Club

At age 53, Calamity Lambkin's life is unraveling at the seams. Beginning "the change of life" and grappling with the loss of the father she nursed for the past two years, she is unprepared for her past materializing out of thin air.

It seems that the onset of menopause has reawakened the "finding" gift Calamity possessed as a youth. Only now, the lost items come to her--everything from her favorite stuffed animal, which literally falls from the sky, to her father's cashew grove, which appears one evening in the yard of her new home.

Things become even more complicated as Calamity investigates her father's past and then finds a mysterious 3-year-old boy, who may be one of the sea people, washed up on the beach. Her caring for him as her own son causes problems with her own grown daughter and young grandson.

A fiercely independent woman, the novel's protagonist became a single mom at age sixteen. As an adult she eschewed her given name Chastity, for Calamity, a name she insists everyone from the local minister to her own daughter use. A very real character, Calamity is fraught with imperfections: honest to a fault, she curses like crazy and has unknowingly cultivated a hard heart caused by her love for an unobtainable man.

Set in the lush West Indies and imbued with their culture and unique problems, The New Moon's Arms is a mesmerizing book. Hopkinson deftly handles both the mystery of the sea people and the anomaly of the local Mediterranean monk seals, adding fantastical and historical elements to both.

In only one area does one's suspension of disbelief begin to falter. Hopkinson has turned her thee gay/bisexual characters into "saints." Each is horribly mistreated by Calamity, yet forgives her with barely a second thought. That one of them would forgive her is plausible, but that all three of them do--with nary a grudge--is unrealistic, as is the fact that one of them would agree to baby-sit for her just days after he'd been kicked out of her house under a torrent of abuse.

Armchair Interviews says: Nalo Hopkinson's fourth novel continues the fine work of "one of most impressively original authors to emerge in years."