Salt Roads

The Salt Roads, Nalo Hopkinson. I was surprised early in the book by a few scenes that seemed weirdly familiar - I think I must have started reading it once before and given up before I got very far, and then forgotten I did that. In fact, it didn't really work for me this time around either, but this time I finished it at least. The book follows three characters in different times and places, and various things happen to them, but there isn't really a plot in terms of wondering or anticipating how events will lead to other events? I kept waiting for the reveal of some sort of bigger connection between the three characters but that also doesn't really happen. It reminded me a bit of Everfair (my review here) in its directionlessness, which it turns out is not entirely a coincidence or a case of me lumping together black women writing sffnal historical fiction, Hopkinson and Shawl have actually co-written together, and might plausibly belong to the same artistic movement that I just don't know how to read or isn't to my taste or whatever. (But Everfair at least had a lot of awesome elements, so much of Salt Roads was... honestly just ugly? Like the Haiti parts were powerful in the way that anything about the reality of lives under chattel slavery is, and had a few vivid moments, but so much of the other two threads were cringeworthy, or squalid, or just so random...) Hopkinson said in an author's note that she "finds most science fiction/fantasy horribly badly written", so I think this may be a case where I just fundamentally disagree with this author about how stories work or what makes them good. Not every book needs to be for me, of course (white woman doesn't like book for Black audience, who the fuck cares) but I can only read as me. (And I feel like I don't need remedial reading on believing that black/queer/disabled people have existed throughout history, or that the whole "whites and castles" genre of historical fantasy is ahistorical and racist.)