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CREATURES OF PASSAGE

Morowa Yejide

With echoes of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Yejidé's novel explores a forgotten quadrant of Washington, DC, and the ghosts that haunt it.
Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying ill-fated passengers in a haunted car: a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River.

Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash - reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw - has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the "River Man," who somehow appears each time he goes there.

When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys's door one day bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face both the family she abandoned and what frightens her most when she looks in the mirror.
Creatures of Passage beautifully threads together the stories of Nephthys, Dash, and others both living and dead. Morowa Yejidé's deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim themselves.

MOROWA YEJIDÉ, a native of Washington, DC, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Time of the Locust, which was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, longlisted for the 2015 PEN/Bingham Prize, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee. She lives in the DC area with her husband and three sons. Creatures of Passage is her second novel.

Yejidé's debut novel, Time of the Locust, was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Award, and an NAACP Image Award nominee; Time of the Locust received glowing praise in the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Essence, Ebony, and more!
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Published 2021-03-16 by Akashic Books - Brooklyn (USA)

Comments

Every once in a while, a novel is so compelling that it changes your sense of a place. (Consider Lyra Belacqua's Oxford in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.) Morowa Yejidé's Creatures of Passage is that book. It is set in a mythological version of Washington, DC's Anacostia, a predominantly Black neighborhood, sited on a hill across the Potomac with spectacular views of the city. Yejidé's characters are so finely drawn, her language so lush, the city's landmarks so cleverly repurposed within this magical setting, that the fictional place feels as real as the place itself . . . Yejidé's writing captures both real news and spiritual truths with the deftness and capacious imagination of her writing foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin . . . Creatures of Passage is that rare novel that dispenses ancestral wisdom and literary virtuosity in equal measure

Although set in our recent past, Creatures of Passage is at heart a powerful ghost story about people haunted by the shadows of time and the shadows of blood. In the pages of this novel we discover a world that is fully recognizable, as concrete and real as Toni Morrison's Ohio, but also as fantastic and mythical as Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo. That said, make no mistake: Morowa Yejidé is a masterful storyteller in her own right, able to spin and sustain an inventive tale illuminated by a singular truth, that death is 'another form of living.'

Creatures of Passage resists comparison. It's reminiscent of Beloved as well as the Odyssey, but perhaps its most apt progenitor is the genre of epic poems performed by the djelis of West Africa . . . All these otherwise clashing elements become, in this cast, a cohesive whole, telling us that this, too, is America.

Yejidé's surreal new novel has no shortage of otherworldly surprises, but it's her this-worldly protagonist who steals the show . . . Informed by a richly woven mythology and propelled by themes of regret and revenge, Creatures of Passage has earned some apt comparisons to Toni Morrison's Beloved.

"In its luminous prose, and its nods to mysticism and myth, the novel brings to mind the best of Toni Morrison. It's that good."

UK: Jacaranda

Comparisons to Toni Morrison's masterpiece Beloved always perk up our ears, but in the case of Morowa Yejidé's Creatures of Passage the hype is warranted . . . History-haunted in the best sense, readers shouldn't miss this mythic thriller.

In this beautifully written and gloriously conceived novel, Morowa Yejidé reveals her mastery yet again. This novel is both contemporary and ancient, frightening and stirring, playful and wise, an unforgettable blurring of reality and genres from its haunted Plymouth automobile to the mysteries in the fog in this alternate America and hidden Washington, DC. With its lyricism and bold imagination, Creatures of Passage is unlike anything you've ever read.

Skillfully blending fantasy and stark reality while blurring the line between the metaphoric and the tangible, Yejidé successfully tells the story in fits and starts as each major character adds a piece to the puzzle . . . Highly recommended."

Comparisons will be made to Toni Morrison and they will be well founded, but Morowa Yejidé is in a class of her own with Creatures of Passage, a mesmerizing tale about love, loss, revenge, death, and restoration that hovers close to the edge of fantasy yet is deeply grounded in history and in a reality easily recognizable in the contemporary world.

"A deeper, broader, and more audacious immersion in magical realism . . . Historic detail and mythic folklore forge a scary, thrilling vision of life along America's margins."

"Yejidé creates a tapestry of interconnected stories of guilt, loss, love, grief, justice, and restoration . . . Yejidé's prose is often stunning . . . The story's rich texture evokes the ghost stories of Toni Morrison."