Ex dente leonem reviewed Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
Review of 'Brown Girl in the Ring' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A masterpiece of postcolonial literary sf, rightfully belonging alongside those of Octavia Butler, Ursula le Guin, and the dystopias of fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood, and Hopkinson is as powerful a storyteller as her peers. Seeing through the eyes of Brown Girl's Jamaican and Caribbean characters might be challenging at first for certain readers more accustomed to the voices almost always given precedence in conventional literature, but its story is as fully immersive as a ceremonial drum rhythm. With its Afrofuturistic elements and its initially bleak but ultimately hopeful vision of a city after/beyond local collapse of the nation-state, I would even call Brown Girl in the Ring a foundational classic not just of the still-emerging solarpunk movement, but also of its younger sibling lunarpunk, a darker and more mystical imagining of how such futures may unfold.
