Leone Ross (Orange Laughter) took 15 years to write her fourth book, Popisho. This sweat equity has yielded 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 gifted by the gods with an extra-magical ability called cors, a "little something-something... so inexpressibly [their] own." Here, "strange things ordinary."
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. These deaths have taken a toll on her marriage and now she's out looking for her missing husband. 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.
At the heart of Popisho's flushed stage--full of everyday "fool-fool madness," vexing graffiti from a mysterious source, swelling civil unease, impending nuptials, a carnivalesque beauty contest, an incoming mythological hurricane with an agenda, and an anatomical mishap that befalls a large portion of the island--is Ross's ability to build a controlled and timed emotional crescendo and collapse it to relief or revelation. Occasional vignettes of random and unsettling asides undergird the characterization of the archipelago's singularity.
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. While some of the gender dynamics are a bit constricting, Ross otherwise flips order on its head and imbues complex and lively depth into each character, their (mis)adventures and the colonial legacies of the islands. Popisho is a wonder-filled and entertaining reflection on death, freedom, community and recovery. --Shannon Hanks-Mackey, editor and writer
Shelf Talker: Over the course of a day, inhabitants of a fantastical chain of islands seek love and freedom amid unruly magic and corrupt politics.