With her fourth book, Popisho, Leone Ross (Orange Laughter) delivers an enthralling and vivid portrait of a people and a place, brimming with love, politics, grief, addiction, sex, varicolored humor and some impossible flora and fauna. Inspired by Jamaica, where Ross grew up, the fictional archipelago of Popisho is home to peoples blessed by the gods with an extra-magical ability called cors, a "little something-something... so inexpressibly [their] own."
Xavier Redchoose's wife is dead. Weighted by guilt, he's pulling out of a year of immobilizing sorrow still wondering why her ghost has yet to return to him so that he can put her to rest in the traditional manner. As the current macaenus, his cors is the ability to "flavour food through the palm of his hands" and create for his diners a bespoke meal made "out of their feelings." There's an important feast to prepare, ingredients to hunt, but his wife isn't the only ghost preoccupying him as lost loves and old habits resurface.
Anise has "intimate comprehension of other people's bodies" and uses it to heal them. Even so, she can't stop the multiple miscarriages she suffers. Elsewhere, twins Sonteine and Romanza defy their powerful father to fight for both love and agency, and the marginalized indigenous people of the archipelago sense something has gone wrong with the islands and their communities.
Popisho is thick with imagery and memories, making it easy to miss that this engrossing 480-page story unfolds mostly over the span of one day. It is a wonder-filled and entertaining reflection on death, freedom, community and recovery. --Shannon Hanks-Mackey, editor and writer