After rereading Hopkinson's "Brown Girl in the Ring" I promised myself I would read more of her work. This is the next of her books I have read, and it is wonderful, an engaging story told in the first-person by an engaging woman with real world problems and also some problems caused by an ability to find lost things and an encounter with mer-people, whom Hopkinson gives a back story as slaves who become transformed when the slave ship carrying them to the market is wrecked and one of their number invokes the help of a supernatural power. I'm hooked on Hopkinson. ( )

Hm.
So, I really liked this book. I love how abrasive Calamity is. She's mighty flawed, and it's really great to follow the narrative from her perspective. That is, until she gets all homophobic. And she doesn't appear to be on her way to learning a lesson by the end either. While I love that there's more than one queer person in this book (and a bisexual man! rare in media!), and their portrayal is nothing but positive, we only see them through Calamity's eyes, and she's NOT into it. I keep wavering about this...I might have given this 4 stars if not for the the homophobia, and I keep thinking that it's just the character who is homophobic because the queer people were happy and proud and lovely and fed right up with Calamity, and that tension did add something to the story and the character development...but it also took away from that by being too much of a focal point.

Other than that, Calamity is a fabulous character. I know a lot of reviewers didn't like her style, but I thought she was great. Vain, self-centered, yet caring and regretful. She's been hurt and has hurt and she feels shitty about all of it, but she doesn't necessarily deal with it well.

I love all the subtle magic as well. I love the Caribbean selkie fairy tale, and Calamity's menopause magic that I suppose she gets from her water-mom!. I look forward to reading more from Nalo Hopkinson! ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2020/01/2020003-new-moons-arms-nalo-hopkinson.htm... ( )

Calamity is a 53-year-old woman who has just taken buried her father. She has stormy relationships with other people and her menopause has brought her gifts beyond hot flashes and night sweats, items from her childhood and earlier life keep re-appearing in her life. She discovers a strange boy on the beach, washed up by a storm. She decides to foster the boy and overlook his webbed fingers and propensity to eat his shrimp raw. She also comes to terms with her adult daughter and her father while raising the sea boy and then deciding to send him back to his own people. Calamity is deeply conflicted and really enjoyable to read about. ( )

I really enjoyed this story - the first book I've read by Nalo Hopkinson. Though set in the present, it takes place on and around some fictional Caribbean islands and mixes in a little magic too - rather unusual magic. The main character is a lady who is having to come to terms with the reality of ageing, and she's not doing it gracefully. The relationships she has with others, especially her daughter form the core of the book. Not for nothing has she renamed herself 'Calamity'. ( )