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Book Review: Bayou Magic
Sep. 14th, 2017 09:12 am”I’ve got another one. Another saying. ‘Planting seeds grows happiness.’”
“C’est vrai.” Grandmere starts rocking again, her lips upturned.
I think but don’t say: Sometimes bad happens.
Sayings come from observing the world. As true as the sun rises and sets, bad is. That’s what I’ve learned.
Oil and salt destroy land. A bird’s wing gets broken. A turtle gets eaten by a gator.
Mami Wata couldn’t stop Membe being captured as a slave.
This quote does not entirely capture Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Bayou Magic - the book is more hopeful than this excerpt really expresses - but it does capture the rhythm and the cadence of the book, the darkness that hangs just beyond the light of the fireflies Maddy’s grandmother teaches her to summon. There is light and beauty and magic in this book, but these things can only hope to hold back the badness, to make it bearable, not to defeat it.
I was curious how Rhodes would combine a “girl meets magic” storyline with African-American history without either getting losing the wish-fulfillment aspects that make this sort of story fun, or else getting too wish-fulfillment-y which would require straight-up ignoring the ugly parts of history. In fact, she finds an excellent balance between the two - with room to spare for beautiful passages about the bayou and the mermaids, which both seem to get more magical through their association with each other.
This is the third book in a series (I’m not sure how tightly connected the series is; they might just be connected by the premise, “African-American heroines in Louisiana + magic”), and now I want to go back and read the first two.
“C’est vrai.” Grandmere starts rocking again, her lips upturned.
I think but don’t say: Sometimes bad happens.
Sayings come from observing the world. As true as the sun rises and sets, bad is. That’s what I’ve learned.
Oil and salt destroy land. A bird’s wing gets broken. A turtle gets eaten by a gator.
Mami Wata couldn’t stop Membe being captured as a slave.
This quote does not entirely capture Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Bayou Magic - the book is more hopeful than this excerpt really expresses - but it does capture the rhythm and the cadence of the book, the darkness that hangs just beyond the light of the fireflies Maddy’s grandmother teaches her to summon. There is light and beauty and magic in this book, but these things can only hope to hold back the badness, to make it bearable, not to defeat it.
I was curious how Rhodes would combine a “girl meets magic” storyline with African-American history without either getting losing the wish-fulfillment aspects that make this sort of story fun, or else getting too wish-fulfillment-y which would require straight-up ignoring the ugly parts of history. In fact, she finds an excellent balance between the two - with room to spare for beautiful passages about the bayou and the mermaids, which both seem to get more magical through their association with each other.
This is the third book in a series (I’m not sure how tightly connected the series is; they might just be connected by the premise, “African-American heroines in Louisiana + magic”), and now I want to go back and read the first two.
