Customer Reviews

The New Moon's Arms

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
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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

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

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."

I found the beginning of this novel a little difficult to get into, despite the technical quality of the writing always being top-notch. Until I got to know the main character a little more, I didn't understand why she had to be so difficult with other people sometimes.

Not far in, however, the flashback sequences start and lend a truly mesmerizing element of magical realism to the story. There are really two stories coming to a meeting here, past and present interweaving to explain how this woman came to this place in her life, forcing her to move beyond events that have stifled her.

I also loved the fact that the main character wasn't another twenty-something, but a woman entering menopause. I was lucky enough to hear the author talk about this book, and that's quite an intentional and crucial aspect of the story. There's a scene early on in the story on the beach at night, with just the main character. It is, in my opinion, the best scene in the entire book - it lends a kind of magic to the story that only that character could bring, and she has to be a woman of some years for this to work. It sure damn did.

My only other criticism of the story is that it seemed to me to meander just a little bit toward the end, and the end didn't seem as developed as I would have liked.

Overall, for me, the glorious moments (the beach scene, the tree-climbing scene, the appearance of the cashew grove) more than made up for the parts that were 'only' good. Most writers should have such problems with their writing. I will definitely be reading more from this author.

Calamity Lambkin, born Chastity and renamed by choice, is burying her father as this novel opens. She's 53 years old, just entering menopause, and starting a new phase of her life in other respects as she tries to remember that she no longer has an invalid at home to care for. She also has a wounded relationship with the daughter whose birth when Calamity was 16 defined her life, and a grandson she adores and wants to keep safe. She especially wants to keep him safe from people like Michael, her childhood best friend, who fathered her daughter and in that one heterosexual experience proved to himself that he was (and is) gay.

When she was a little girl, Chastity could find lost things. Now that she's reached the age when hot flashes signal waning fertility, those hot flashes start bringing her - magically - lost things from out of her past. Things like her old tricycle. Things like her daughter's toy dump truck. Not to mention the cashew tree orchard from the back yard of her girlhood home, which drowned in a long ago hurricane...that one catches other people's notice, and of course they want desperately to explain it. Just as they want to explain the physical oddities of a small boy whom Calamity finds on her Caribbean island's shore, half drowned and speaking only a language that no one finds familiar.

This novel blurs the genre lines delightfully. Its fantastic elements classify it, for me, as speculative fiction; but it reads like literary fiction. Above all it is the story of Calamity's belated coming of age, as she faces her past and finally starts to deal with it.

--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of 2005 EPPIE winner "Regs" and "High Places"

Nalo Hopkinson creates the best character voices of any contemporary writer. It's not just that the rhythms feel right--although they do. It's especially the way people embed endearment and reprisal into the same speech acts. People in Hopkinson's books love each other up and down the scale of contact (casual to intimate, supportive to aggressive, official to informal), and this range comes through in how they speak to each other. In this particular book, the magic is also brilliant--deeply connected to the main character's conflict but also infused with a sense of place (the post-colonial island setting).

But everyone else has already rated this book a triumph. What I hope to add is over-the-moon praise for its success as an audio book. Gin Hammond is one of the best narrators I've ever heard, and I listen to 10 hours of audiobooks a week. She captures Calamity's voice the best, but also gives distinct but subtle shading to every other character young and old, male and female. She laughs and snarls beautifully, and she captures the wistful but hard-edged tone of a book that believes in magic and still holds us responsible for every act and decision. Taken together, the book and performance are transporting. Bravo!

I loved Nalo Hopkinson's The New Moon's Arms. I really enjoyed all her earlier books, but this one I fell in love with completely. It's such a perfect mix of quirky magic and universal mother-daughter dynamics, all narrated by a character who's deeply flawed and yet somehow irresistible. She says and does such awful stuff, with so little self-consciousness - yet she suffers deeply from her own mistakes, she's really trying to do her best, and she's re-named herself "Calamity" in recognition of how often she screws up. She's so perfectly herself, and one of the most engaging narrators I've read in a long time.

I read this book because it's my book club's May 2007 book selection. This is my first time reading this author's work and I honestly feel nothing for this book nor the characters. The book did NOT resonate at all with me and I had to read the book synopsis on Amazon to jog my memory. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a friend as I could barely recall the names of some of the main characters, let alone the central plot or any supporting themes.

It also took me awhile to get used to the language and I often had to re-read passages, which is NOT a good thing when reading an unfamiliar and/or new author.

The only positive thing I can write about the author is Hopkinson does understand the craft of writing. I also liked how she wove historical elements from the middle passage into the novel as an origin/explanation for the sea people -- very clever. But, these things aside, I am NOT compelled to read previous or future works by this author.