The New Moon's Arms (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When an abandoned toddler appears on the shore of her Caribbean island home, Chastity Theresa Lambkin, aka "Calamity," becomes a foster mother in her 50s. Years previously, a one time, teenage experiment with a best friend unsure of his sexuality resulted in daughter Ifeoma. As Calamity, who narrates, now freely admits, Ifeoma bore the brunt of Calamity's immaturity, and their relationship still suffers for it. As Calamity relates all of this, things that have been missing for years inexplicably reappear, including an entire cashew tree orchard from Calamity's childhood that shows up in her backyard overnight. It could be island magic, or something much more prosaic. The rescued little boy's origins do have some genuinely magical elements (Calamity names him "Agway" after his foreign-sounding laughter), and Hopkinson's take on "sea people" and how they came to be adds depth and enchantment. Agway's presence, however, ratchets up the tension between Calamity and Ifeoma (who has a lovely son of her own, Stanley). Calamity proves emotionally adroit and winningly frank in a variety of situations (the men in her life have a preponderance of issues), and Hopkinson (The Salt Roads) gives her story a sassy, loving touch. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jennifer Howard

Unusual things happen to Calamity Lambkin. A cashew orchard sprouts in her backyard overnight. Toys she played with as a child drop from the sky. A half-drowned toddler washes up, tangled in seaweed, on her stretch of beach.

Is it magical realism Caribbean-style, or is it menopause? Before each event, Calamity feels flushed and feverish. She gets that itchy-fingertip feeling she used to get as a kid right before she found something that had gone missing. It's like the bumper sticker says, "These aren't hot flashes, they're power surges."

In Calamity's case, that might be true. Hot-tongued and hot-tempered, she has spent most of her adulthood vigorously not living up to her birth name, Chastity. Why should things change now that she's in her 50s? Menopause or no menopause, she has no plans to mend her ways, much to the chagrin of her grown-up, oh-so-serious daughter, Ifeoma. At least Calamity's grandson, 9-year-old Stanley, approves of her -- not that she minds anybody's disapproval in the slightest. "You cuss like a sailor, you have a temper like a crocodile, but you more honest than any judge I know," a new love interest, Gene, tells her.

In fact, she has her eye on two younger men: Gene, a Coast Guard officer whom she meets at her father's funeral, and Hector, a marine researcher who helps with the rescue of the little boy on the beach. Calamity takes the lost boy under her wing until someone figures out where he belongs. But nobody on the big island of Cayaba can figure out what language he speaks, so Calamity borrows one of his own sounds and calls him Agway.

On her Web site, the Caribbean-born Hopkinson tells readers that she writes "speculative fiction," which she defines as "fiction in which impossible things happen." Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, dived into a dystopian, near-future version of Toronto, the city she now calls home. Her next book, Midnight Robber, went off-world to tell an island-inflected story of Carnival, incest and the outlaw life.

Although Hopkinson has invented Cayaba -- along with Blessée and Dolorosse, two smaller islands that play cameo roles -- The New Moon's Arms makes the most of the sea-meets-sand world of the author's own childhood. It's a pleasant place to hunker down for a while, and Calamity is good, salty company. She gets drunk, calls people names and manages to be a good soul despite it. On these islands, rumors of murder seem less real than rumors of mermaids. Even the local monk seals have a mystery about them, revealed in a folktale that intertwines, seaweed-like, with the main story.

The New Moon's Arms is a dance of lost-and-found: A lost boy helps a woman find elements of her past and herself that she hadn't even missed. "More of my rediscovered treasures," Calamity thinks, "come sailing back to me on the seas of a night sweat." Hopkinson knows not to get too sentimental about any of it, thanks in large part to her heroine's unsinkable sense of humor: "I rubbed the itchy hand. What was going to appear out of thin air this time? My first training bra with its pointy, itchy cups of white cotton? . . . Some things need to stay lost."

I can't say I expect this novel to come back to me, years from now, like one of Calamity's lost treasures. But for a while, anyway, it let me hear the mermaids singing.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (February 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446576913
• ISBN-13: 978-0446576918
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #687,826 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost and Found..., February 22, 2007

By	Phyllis Rhodes (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson is a wonderfully imagined, page-turning offering that combines a bit of fantasy, mystery, and romance. Amid a Caribbean backdrop, the author delivers a story centered on a 53-year-old pistol, Chastity Lambkin, who is grieving the recent loss of her estranged father to lung cancer. She is a sprightly, independent library research assistant who is determined to avoid the matronly image and cling to her youth at all costs. She demands that everyone including her daughter, Ife, and grandson, Stanley, call her Calamity. She holds nothing back (including her tongue) which has caused a long-standing strained relationship with Ife. It is revealed fairly early in the novel that a portion of Calamity's angst resides in unresolved childhood issues and events including an untimely departure of her mother resulting in her father being arrested as a murder suspect in her disappearance when she was ten. Lost love and an unplanned pregnancy at fifteen resulted in her father's emotional, financial, and physical withdrawal from her at sixteen.

It is never a dull moment with Calamity. Try as she might, she is losing the battle with Mother Nature and with the encroaching onset of menopause, she reawakens a unique, repressed childhood gift to find lost things. This gift, which hilariously coincides with tingling fingers and hot flashes at the most inopportune moments, results in remnants from the past literally falling from the sky triggering a reemergence of forgotten and sometimes painful memories. Following her father's funeral, Calamity partakes in a drinking binge to wallow in self-pity on the nearby beach. She awakens to discover a "lost" child has washed ashore covered in seaweed. Careful medical examination by her childhood friend-turned- tormentor, Dr. Chow, confirms that the child is a bit "different;'" and deliberately suppresses her suspicions that he is one of the mythical Sea People. When two similar adult bodies are discovered the next day, Calamity identifies with the orphan's apparent parental loss. She names him Agway; embraces and welcomes him into her home worsening her frail relationship with Ife even more.

To complicate matters further, she is suddenly overwhelmed by life: Her new love suggests opening the unsolved cold case surrounding her mother's disappearance; Ife's marriage is in shambles spawned by arguments with her husband surrounding the upcoming election and the heated political factions facing the island's tourist trade; Ife's father, her first love, comes to visit and brings his new lover; Stanley needs her assistance to complete his school project; endangered, indigenous seals are missing from the local zoo; and last, caring for a rambunctious three-year-old "merboy" who loves to eat raw shrimp is putting her close to the edge!

It may sound a bit convoluted but it is not; the author does an excellent job of lacing the plot threads together and it all comes together beautifully. It is a delightful, endearing story about family, loss, and reclamation. I absolutely loved the infusion of humor, African Diasporatic themes, West Indian culture, language, history, and folklore into the story. This is one of my favorite reads so far this year.

Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
Nubian Circle Book Club

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I thought it would be like riding a bicycle", February 20, 2008

By	Amanda Richards "Modest to the extreme" (Georgetown, Guyana) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a fascinating book that you'll want to read in one sitting. A combination of fantasy, mystery, drama, humor and relationships, the author draws you in from the first chapter, as she recounts an embarrassing incident at a funeral. After all, who can stop reading a book that includes in its opening paragraphs a line like "Mrs. Winter had given up the attempt to discreetly pull her bloomers back up"?

Bloomers aside, by the time I reached page two, I realized from the language that not only was the setting in the Caribbean, but that most of the colloquial expressions were Guyanese. A background check revealed that Ms. Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, but that her famous father was a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor, and that she had once lived in Guyana with her family. A-ha! Case closed!

Set on the fictional islands of Dolorosse, Cayaba and Blessée to a lesser extent, the main character is a reluctant grandmother (in her early fifties) who has a hissy fit when her daughter calls her a matriarch or reveals any hints about her advancing age. Given the name "Chastity" at birth, she insists on being called "Calamity", and as a child had the ability to find lost things.

Several things happen in the story that bring about major changes in her life -

1. Her mother disappears without a trace
2. She gets pregnant at fifteen after an experimental encounter with a close friend
3. She has a close encounter of the strange kind with a girl of the sea. (As in Chicken of the Sea)
4. Her father passes away
5. Menopause
6. The return of the ability to find lost things.

Not one to let these things hold her back, Calamity continues to live her carefree dysfunctional life, barely making ends meet, when into her life come not one, but two younger men, and then to complicate matters further, in washes a young boy with the tide.

There's much more to tell in this fast-paced book, but I'll let you discover the twists and turns on your own. Suffice to say, it involves colorful language, myths and legends, the supernatural, alternative lifestyles, relationships, politics, extinct mammals and yes, the droopy bloomers.

One of the best books I've read in a while.



Amanda Richards, February 20, 2008

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A touch of fantasy island, February 14, 2007

By	Reader Views "www.readerviews.com" (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews

Reviewed by Beverly Pechin for Reader Views (1/07)

The author does a wonderful job of combining a bit of fantasy with a touch of romance and just a dab of reality to create a story with such great depth that the reader is carried away into a whole new world.

Chastity never really had it "good." A teen mother, pregnant from her first sexual encounter, she lived in the shadows of a world that never seemed right. Her mother disappeared from her life with no real answer as to what happened. Her father was always rather aloof about her life, sometimes showing signs of truly caring for her while in the next breath making her feel as though she was worthless. Her best friend had become her worst enemy. She lived in poverty and never knew the real world in any other way then what she saw from her own tarnished heart as she grew up.

Fast forward to a time when Chastity becomes "Calamity," even if everyone on the island won't call her by the new name she's chosen to use. She deals with the death of her father, the too typical lack of finances, a romantic situation that she's not so sure if she should welcome or run from and top it off with "the change of life." Could anything else go wrong in her now crazy life? Well of course. Add on another complete stranger, attractive, sexy and younger that sweeps her off her feet. And if that's not enough, save the life of a child who washes up from the sea and feel the need to be there for the child. Calamity finds herself becoming a mother again as she opts to care for this special little boy who's parents were found washed up from the sea dead. But this is no ordinary boy.

Calamity has always had a sixth sense about her and it seems like this is just the beginning of this sense going rampant through her body. Is it the fact that she's going through menopause or is there more to it than meets the eye? Suddenly, things from the past appear out of nowhere. Her childhood toys drop from the sky. Whole groves suddenly are growing in an orchard that had long since been left to its own despair. Her pantry is suddenly filled to the ceiling, but not because she filled it.

Realizing that some of the mysteries of the island she has grown up on could possibly be truth, she takes on a whole new direction in life at a moment when most are realizing their life is no longer able to be changed. The boy she's rescued seems to truly be "unique" in a way that only certain locals can understand and she knows she has to protect him from the real world around them. Can she end up saving this child and making him live a "normal" life? Does she really want to? And what about the 2 lovers she's attracted to? Which one should she choose? And can she ever make amends with her own daughter for the choices she made as a teen mother? Can she let go of the pain she's carried with her throughout her entire life?

As she deals with family issues and issues of her own maturity, Calamity finds that nothing in her world is what it seems and much of her world is like a fantasy gone wild. She has a chance to make a difference and do things right this time, but will she blow it? From finding out truths of those around her to finding out the truth about herself, this "change of life" will truly end up being a life of change.

Packed with fantasy, romance and tragedy you'll never find a dull moment in this colorful story about "Sea People," family, coming to grips with your own past and a touch of romance. Calamity is a woman of full character that will bind your heart the instant you meet her in "The New Moon's Arms." From her spitfire personality to her own self doubt you can't help but fall in love with her and cheer for her to finally find peace in her life.