by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based Blogger

Riverhead Books, 2015.

Welcome to the 2015 Paper Based Advent Book Blog! Day Fourteen bestows on us a historical and literary fiction blending that stirs family tree mysteries; magical goings-on, and savage, serene portrayals of womanhood – all in one triumphant maiden voyage of a first novel: Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning.

In this world of both preserved memory and factual reconstruction, the language mesmerizes and entrances, with all the skill evident in Yanique’s OCM Bocas fiction prizewinning debut, How to Escape From a Leper Colony. The Bradshaw family is the focus of this new book, and the author gifts us sixty years of their astonishing highs and devastating lows, stitching the spaces between conflicting and tumultuous generations with a brand of magical realism uniquely informed by her Virgin Islands setting.

Some of the story’s most luminous and illuminating sections arrive when the narrative switches between the book’s fortune-seeking, disparate yet deeply bonded sisters, Eona and Anette, products of a union as spangled by secrets and star-crossings as the romances these siblings go on to themselves conduct. Witness Anette, gazing out at sea, reflecting on a love that, in the novel’s penchant for well-layered confessionals, carries more than its own fair share of dark buried treasure:

“The sun was reddening the sky. The sea air was filling her. This moving and big and overwhelming blue sea. This active and passionate and relenting blue sea. And she thought of the first man she had really loved. The way they knew each other’s bodies, even in the dark — like they were aboriginal to each other.”

Laying claim unpretentiously to the standard of an epic story, Land of Love and Drowning takes us fathoms deep, past shipwrecks and secrets into the heart of an island, discovering itself.

We recommend it for: Devotees of magical realism, from García Márquez to Allende to newer voices in the genre; lovers of domestic sagas peppered with high drama; those looking for a kindred read to Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light.