Creatures of Passage

January 18, 2021
A woman drives a haunted Plymouth through 1977 Washington, D.C., in Yejidé’s ambitious latest (after Time of the Locust). In the city’s Anacostia neighborhood, Nephthys Kinwell drinks to numb the pain of losing her twin brother, Osiris, and with the ghost of a girl in the trunk of her car, ferries people whose voices she hears through fog that accumulates in the car. Osiris was lynched and dumped in the Anacostia River and remains restless in death, while his 10-year-old grandson, Dash, is taunted by schoolmates for communing with a mysterious figure on the Anacostia banks only he can see, whom he calls the River Man. Then there’s a janitor at Dash’s Catholic school, Mercy Ratchet, who was sexually assaulted by a priest as a boy and now preys on young children. Yejidé creates a tapestry of interconnected stories of guilt, loss, love, grief, justice, and restoration as the story builds toward an intense climax involving Mercy and Dash, and one of Nephthys’s fares, known only as the “colonel’s wife,” confronts her own family tragedy. While at times the book can feel didactic, with the characters very obviously meant as metaphors for historical trauma, Yejidé’s prose is often stunning. At its best, the story’s rich texture evokes the ghost stories of Toni Morrison.

January 15, 2021
In which late-1970s Washington, D.C., is reimagined as an enchanted land populated by changelings, phantoms, seers, waking nightmares, and at least one haunted car. Yejid� follows up her debut, Time of the Locust (2014), with a deeper, broader, and more audacious immersion in magical realism. It is set in 1977, and the District of Columbia is here labeled "the capital" and is surrounded by the Kingdoms of Maryland and Virginia, which are in turn parts of the "united territories" presided over by a succession of elected kings. In the city's Anacostia section, "an isle of blood and desire...where all things lived and died on the edges of time and space and meaning," Nephthys Kinwell operates a kind of supernatural jitney service, showing up, at times unbidden, in her rickety Plymouth Belvedere to take the community's lonely, wayward, or forsaken wherever they want to go. Even through the car's rattling, her passengers can hear the ghost of a White woman tapping or shifting around in the trunk. But apparently everybody living in this alternate universe is accustomed to dead people hanging around the neighborhood. Among the more restless of those spirits is Osiris, Nephthys' twin brother, pursuing revenge on the White racists who murdered him and dumped his body in the Anacostia River. He's worried about his daughter, Amber, who's visited by dreams of the near future and regularly submits her obliquely worded prophecies to the local Black newspaper. Meanwhile, Amber's young son, Dash, is also seeing things: a "make-believe man" by the river and, worse, a not-so-make-believe act of molestation he witnessed by accident in a school utility closet; he's sure he's spoken to the former while he's still not certain he saw the latter. But the molester, whose name is Mercy, is certain he saw Dash see him. Before long, both mystic visions and real-life horrors converge into a sequence of disquieting revelations from the past and alarming prospects for calamity in the future unless Nephthys and her own spiritual powers can set in motion the hard, necessary work of placating the dead and rescuing the living. Historic detail and mythic folklore forge a scary, thrilling vision of life along America's margins.

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Starred review from February 1, 2021

In a setting resembling Washington, DC, but very much its own place, a psychic mother, a missing father, an estranged aunt, a small boy, a murdered twin, a haunted sky-blue Plymouth Belvedere, and a predatory monster all figure in a compelling story. At its heart is the extraordinary Kinwell family, anchored by Nephthys Kinwell, who ferries people around town in the Plymouth. It's the late 1970s, with poverty, drugs, racism, and sexual abuse as backdrop, and the Kinwells use their magical powers to help and serve their neighbors. They have plenty of work to do, but each works separately from the others. When the youngest member of their own family is threatened, the Kinwells find that only together can they save their boy and themselves. VERDICT Skillfully blending fantasy and stark reality while blurring the line between the metaphoric and the tangible, Yejid� (Time of the Locust) successfully tells the story in fits and starts as each major character adds a piece to the puzzle. YA and adult fiction readers alike will enjoy. Highly recommended.--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2021
Back in 1977, "Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire." In Washington, DC-native Yejid�'s (Time of the Locust, 2014) moody, bleak sophomore title, boundaries between the living and the dead are indiscernible. Once upon a time, Nephthys and Osiris came into the world together, connected by their pointer fingers. Years have passed since Osiris' mangled body was dredged from the Anacostia River, but the twins' connection never frayed. Now his grandson, Dash, arrives at Nephthys' door with stories of the "River Man." At just 10, tragedy defines his life: his father disappeared; his mother, who was pulled from her dead mother's run-over body, knows when death will come to others; and he's seen unspeakable things at school. He barely knows his taxi-driver great-aunt Nephthys, except that she's got some sort of power as she ferries desperate strangers seeking inexplicable answers in a Plymouth with the ghost of a dead white girl in the trunk. Unspeakable evil continues--despite its being called "Mercy." Fatal racism, police violence, pedophilia, family dysfunction--and all the other horrific ills of contemporary society wreak destruction, but somehow humanity survives.

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