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Three slave women, bury a stillborn baby and a spirit of the river is awakened. As the spirit gains strength, it learns about life from three different women in different places and times. Three women, slaves on a sugar cane plantation in the Caribbean, go to the river to bury the stillborn pale baby that one of them had just delivered thus awakening a spirit of the river. The spirit then somehow connects three very dissimilar women in various parts of the world and from different centuries as it starts to again come back to consciousness. There is Mer, a healer and wise elder of the slave plantation, who helped bury the baby and who is deeply in love with another woman; Jeanne Duval, a prostitute/entertainer/sexual free spirit in France, who is doing her best to get one of her lovers, poet Charles Baudelaire, to set her up in her own apartment and support her; and then there's Meritet, a prostitute from the fourth century who travels to the Holy Land. This book is unique in that we read bits and pieces of the disjointed thoughts and poetry and musings of all the woman along with the reborn spirit's, intermingled with their continuing lives. The world of fantasy is combined with the very most basic physical acts of these women and the reader is sometimes left behind while the writer goes off on flights of fancy that I suspect only she can understand. Nalo Hopkinsonıs THE SALT ROADS tries to be a work of literary fiction, but is so overwrought and filled with excess emotions, hopes, despair, and physical female sanitary concerns that it becomes a burden to wade through the words. Men are written as evil or oafish while every one of the excess and selfishness of the women is toted as examples of great courage and free thinking valor. The bookıs simplistic take on the world is then buried under masses of artificially poetic snippets. I learned that Ms. Hopkinson usually writes in the fantasy genre, and that helped explain why she takes for granted that the readers would accept that a spirit could be born so easily. It also explains why the story was written with the spiritıs awakening to life as the core of the book, when the lives of the women who are telling their story are of greater interest. I can only recommend this book to people who are already steeped in the fantasy tradition. I found the spirit sections were a nuisance that interrupted the well written portions of the fascinating lives of the three women. The fact that these sections needed to be spaced irregularly in the book made me feel that the author couldnıt use words to keep the story of the spirit attention-grabbing enough. THE SALT ROADS, after an interesting and fascinating beginning, fell apart with the birth of the spirit and plummeted downhill from there until I had little interest in the disjointed narrative of the text. If you like fantasy and are used to it, try and read this book. If you are heeding the urge to read THE SALT ROADS because of the advertisements that Nalo Hopkinson is a writer in the tradition of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, please donıt bother. Itıs only because of that promise that I picked up this book and I was sorely disappointed.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, October 2003
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