THE NEW MOON?S ARMS is a mainstream magical realism novel set in the Caribbean on the fictional island of Dolorosse. Calamity, born Chastity, has renamed herself in a way she feels is most fitting. She?s a 50-something grandmother whose mother disappeared when she was a teenager and whose father has just passed away as she begins menopause. With this physical change of life comes a return of a special power for finding lost things, something she hasn?t been able to do since childhood. A little tingling in the hands then a massive hotflash, and suddenly objects, even whole buildings, lost to her since childhood begin showing up around Calamity. One of the lost things Calamity recovers is a small boy who washes up on the shore outside her house after a rainstorm. She takes this bruised but cheerful 3-year-old under her wing and grows attached to him, a process that awakens all the old memories, frustrations and mysteries around her own mother and father. She?ll learn that this young boy?s family is the most unusual group she?s ever encountered?and they want their son back.
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Book Description
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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Calamity Lambkin has just buried her dadda when the kind of tingling she had as a child just before she found something that had been lost assails her. Since she also starts getting hot flashes, she would shrug the tingling off as another change-of-life symptom, except that she starts finding lost things again. One morning she finds an apparently orphaned toddler washed up on the beach. That little boy is the strongest fanciful--magic realist, if you will--element in the earthily charming story of a woman coming to know and accept herself for the first time. As narrator, Calamity is so persuasive that, until she awakens to the ways she has frustrated herself, readers may not know that they've been dying to snap her out of them, too. She is better than she thinks, and so are her daughter, her daughter's father, his lover, the men she woos, and the old friend she reconciles with over the boy from the sea. The West Indian-accented dialogue adds sweetness and color; Calamity's cussing, spice. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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More About the Author
I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books. If you like knowing about awards and such, my work has received the Warner Aspect First Novel award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian literature of the fantastic, the World Fantasy Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and Honourable Mention in Cuba's Casa de las Americas Prize for literature.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I thought it would be like riding a bicycle",
By Amanda Richards (Georgetown, Guyana) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The New Moon's Arms (Hardcover)
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
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lost and Found...,
By
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This review is from: The New Moon's Arms (Hardcover)
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
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive work,
By Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The New Moon's Arms (Hardcover)
At age 53, Calamity Lambkin's life is unraveling at the seams. Beginning "the change of life" and grappling with the loss of the father she nursed for the past two years, she is unprepared for her past materializing out of thin air.
It seems that the onset of menopause has reawakened the "finding" gift Calamity possessed as a youth. Only now, the lost items come to her--everything from her favorite stuffed animal, which literally falls from the sky, to her father's cashew grove, which appears one evening in the yard of her new home. Things become even more complicated as Calamity investigates her father's past and then finds a mysterious 3-year-old boy, who may be one of the sea people, washed up on the beach. Her caring for him as her own son causes problems with her own grown daughter and young grandson. A fiercely independent woman, the novel's protagonist became a single mom at age sixteen. As an adult she eschewed her given name Chastity, for Calamity, a name she insists everyone from the local minister to her own daughter use. A very real character, Calamity is fraught with imperfections: honest to a fault, she curses like crazy and has unknowingly cultivated a hard heart caused by her love for an unobtainable man. Set in the lush West Indies and imbued with their culture and unique problems, The New Moon's Arms is a mesmerizing book. Hopkinson deftly handles both the mystery of the sea people and the anomaly of the local Mediterranean monk seals, adding fantastical and historical elements to both. In only one area does one's suspension of disbelief begin to falter. Hopkinson has turned her thee gay/bisexual characters into "saints." Each is horribly mistreated by Calamity, yet forgives her with barely a second thought. That one of them would forgive her is plausible, but that all three of them do--with nary a grudge--is unrealistic, as is the fact that one of them would agree to baby-sit for her just days after he'd been kicked out of her house under a torrent of abuse. Armchair Interviews says: Nalo Hopkinson's fourth novel continues the fine work of "one of most impressively original authors to emerge in years." |
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