At the Full and Change of the Moon

From Publishers Weekly
Close on the heels of her well-received first novel (In Another Place, Not Here), Brand delivers a distinguished, visionary work, grounded in the language and legacy of her native Trinidad. Intricately structured and lyrically narrated, the novel invokes the powerful influence of hereditary forces on the far-flung descendants of Marie-Ursule, Trinidadian queen of a secret society of militant slaves. In 1823, in a supreme gesture of rebellion, Marie-Ursule orchestrates a mass slave suicide, from which only her young daughter Bola is spared. In her hideaway at an abandoned monastery on the tip of the island, Bola sinks deep into the spirit of the land and the sea. Roused from her reveries when other islanders move nearby, she has nine children with nine different men, none of whom can tame her. She shuttles her children off into the world, and it is their stories and their children's stories that make up the balance of the novel. While some voices are more memorable than others, snippets of memory tie each back to Marie-Ursule or Bola. Private Sones fights in WWI, falling into madness upon his return to the island. Cordelia, a model of maternal decorum until she turns 50, has simultaneous affairs with an "ice-cream-freezer man" and her seamstress. A haunting portrait of a cold, heartless hustler emerges in Priest, who roams from Florida to New York. "He didn't feel any love for anybody.... He watched them to see if they loved him and what they would do for him if they did." The novel ends in the present day and on a poignant note with a schoolgirl named after her great-grandmother Bola mourning her mother's death. Compressing her far-reaching tale in a tight 300 pages, Brand seamlessly fuses individual and collective identities in a work of poetic achievement. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Brand, an award-winning African Canadian poet, novelist, and short story writer, has written a powerful family saga, filled with passion and anguish. It begins in early-19th-century Trinidad with Marie-Ursule, a rebellious slave leader who plots a mass suicide. She cannot kill her daughter Bola, however, and quietly arranges for her escape. It is through Bola and her children, scattered to the four corners of the world, that the real story unfolds. Brand renders their lives in rich, almost lyrical language, offering up a world filled with unique characters: Cordelia, a woman with insatiable desires; Priest, a would-be evangelist turned gangster; Adrian, his younger brother, a hopeless addict; and a second Bola, living alone in the ruins of the family home, talking to the dead. A provocative book; essential for larger public libraries and all black studies collections.AJanis Williams, Shaker Heights P.L., OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Paula L. Woods
...[an] unsettling and beautifully written novel.


From Booklist
The language in these interlocking tales is as rhythmic as waves in the sea, sometimes incantatory: dreamlike or nightmarish. The story begins in 1824, when a slave on the island of Trinidad, Marie-Ursule, poisons herself and her fellow slaves in a desperate act of defiance but spares her little daughter, Bola. Bola's children, by many fathers, travel to the U.S. and Canada, to London and Amsterdam, and spin out their words like nets to catch the heart. Samuel tries to serve in World War I and is broken by it; Cordelia, in her fiftieth year, blooms with desire heavy as a tropical flower; Eula is haunted by her fallen brother and by the daughter, also named Bola, she sent home to Trinidad from far-off Toronto. Ghosts may fill some of the rooms and wander along the shore, but what happens is all in the mind--mystical and mystifying, true and shadowed. Sometimes evocation is simply exquisite, as the depiction of the prostitute Maya sitting in her window in Amsterdam; other times, as the second Bola inhabits the old house in Trinidad with the ghost of her grandmother, it is terrifying. Fabulous in the deepest sense of the word. GraceAnne A. DeCandido


From Kirkus Reviews
A poetic, loosely plotted tale beginning with an 1824 slave revolt in Trinidad. Herself born in Trinidad (though she now lives in Canada), second-novelist Brand (In Another Place, Not Here, 1997) vividly captures the essence of slavery in the leg irons clapped on Marie-Ursule, the witchy queen of a secret society of slaves. The shackles do physical damage, but their true harm is spiritual, for to be whole Marie-Ursule must be free. By the time the irons are removed, she has gone a little mad. She leads her "regiment" in a final act of defiance, mass suicide, which so distresses the British Admiralty that in another ten years it grudgingly frees the slaves. Marie-Ursule becomes a heroine of the island, both a curse and a great example to her progeny. First among these is Bola, the daughter Marie-Ursule could not bear to take with her to the grave, who lives well into the 20th century. Bola is barely parented by her distraught and often-absent father; she raises herself, becoming an absent-minded figure who sits by the rocks of her tiny inlet, Culebra, watching whales and seducing men. No man sticks around, but Bola begets myriad children and grandchildren, who in turn raise themselves and wander the world from nearby Venezuela to Holland, Israel, and Canada. There's the unpriestly Priest, who becomes a junkie and a gangster in the States; and the intriguing Samuel, of Indian and Trinidadian descent, who wants to fight for England and yet is relegated to hard labor because of his skin color. Finally, there is a modern Bola, a woman living in Culebra, in the family house, searching for an identity. Alice Walker with a Caribbean flavor and believable men: a sort of dream of history. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Dionne Brand has two gifts that are incendiary in combination: a concise and intelligent grasp of the subtleties of emotion and an apparently effortless facility with language. The result is an extraordinary ability to capture the flicker of experience."
-- The Globe and Mail



And in Vintage Canada Paperback

In Another Place, Not Here

A New York Times Editor's Choice and a New York Times Notable Book for 1998

"A must-read book for resisters and dreamers, and for those who believe that the integrity of individual and collective lives cannot be sustained without the ceaseless creation of words and language that reflect and insist on our humanity."
-- MS Magazine

"Passionate in its attention to emotional nuance and visual detail, In Another Place, Not Here weds beauty and a fierce intelligence."
-- The New York Times

"[It] reads with the urgent intensity of a wail that continues to echo."
-- The Washington Post




Bread Out of Stone

"Brand ... is one of the freshest, fiercest voices in Canadian letters."
-- Edmonton Journal

"In this collection [of essays] she can be seen as a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, an intellectual conscience for her country."
-- Adrienne Rich


Book Description
Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe. It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola -- who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century. "[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." -- William Ferguson New York Times Book Review; "A delicately structured, beautifully written novel infused with rare emotional clarity." -- Julie Wheelwright Independent (London); "Rich, elegiac, almost biblical in its rhythms . . . One of the essential works of our times." -- The Globe & Mail (Toronto)


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Rich, Elegiac, almost biblical in its rhythms�One of the essential works of our time�The authority with which Brand sinks into these lives, assuming their very different sensibilities, is astonishing.Read all 6 "From The Critics" >


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