RIVER MUMMA

Alicia's quarter-life-crisis gets supernatural when a Jamaican water deity sends her on a quest.

On her way home from a party, Alicia encounters River Mumma, a beautiful-but-volatile figure who guards gold at the bottom of the Rio Cobre river in Jamaica. She tells Alicia she has twentyfour hours to scour the city for her comb, which was stolen by a Canadian tourist who, despite River Mumma's warnings, will not give the comb back. The day of the quest, Alicia's retail coworkers, Heaven and Mars, unwittingly become a part of her journey, and the three of them face obstacles found in Jamaican folklore, such as malevolent spirits called duppies, as well as figures from Toronto's own legends. The trio also comes up against modern non-supernatural hindrances such as an underfunded transit system. Reid-Benta delivers the story in humorous, pitch-perfect prose, balancing the super natural elements with realism, and sliding in issues of cultural appropriation and cultural inheritance.

Zalika Reid-Benta is a Toronto-based writer whose debut story collection, Frying Plantain, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction. Frying Plantain was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and it was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the White Pine Award, and the Trillium Book Award. Zalika received an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University, was a John Gardner Fiction Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and is an alumnus of the Banff Centre Writing Studio.