The New Moon's Arms

This is a fascinating book that you'll want to read in one sitting. A combination of fantasy, mystery, drama, humor and relationships, the author draws you in from the first chapter, as she recounts an embarrassing incident at a funeral. After all, who can stop reading a book that includes in its opening paragraphs a line like "Mrs. Winter had given up the attempt to discreetly pull her bloomers back up"? Bloomers aside, by the time I reached page two, I realized from the language that not only was the setting in the Caribbean, but that most of the colloquial expressions were Guyanese. A background check revealed that Ms. Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, but that her famous father was a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor, and that she had once lived in Guyana with her family. A-ha! Case closed! Set on the fictional islands of Dolorosse, Cayaba and Blessée to a lesser extent, the main character is a reluctant grandmother (in her early fifties) who has a hissy fit when her daughter calls her a matriarch or reveals any hints about her advancing age. Given the name "Chastity" at birth, she insists on being called "Calamity", and as a child had the ability to find lost things. Several things happen in the story that bring about major changes in her life - 1. Her mother disappears without a trace 2. She gets pregnant at fifteen after an experimental encounter with a close friend 3. She has a close encounter of the strange kind with a girl of the sea. (As in Chicken of the Sea) 4. Her father passes away 5. Menopause 6. The return of the ability to find lost things. Not one to let these things hold her back, Calamity continues to live her carefree dysfunctional life, barely making ends meet, when into her life come not one, but two younger men, and then to complicate matters further, in washes a young boy with the tide. There's much more to tell in this fast-paced book, but I'll let you discover the twists and turns on your own. Suffice to say, it involves colorful language, myths and legends, the supernatural, alternative lifestyles, relationships, politics, extinct mammals and yes, the droopy bloomers. One of the best books I've read in a while. Amanda Richards, February 20, 2008

I loved Nalo Hopkinson's The New Moon's Arms. I really enjoyed all her earlier books, but this one I fell in love with completely. It's such a perfect mix of quirky magic and universal mother-daughter dynamics, all narrated by a character who's deeply flawed and yet somehow irresistible. She says and does such awful stuff, with so little self-consciousness - yet she suffers deeply from her own mistakes, she's really trying to do her best, and she's re-named herself "Calamity" in recognition of how often she screws up. She's so perfectly herself, and one of the most engaging narrators I've read in a long time.

The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson is a wonderfully imagined, page-turning offering that combines a bit of fantasy, mystery, and romance. Amid a Caribbean backdrop, the author delivers a story centered on a 53-year-old pistol, Chastity Lambkin, who is grieving the recent loss of her estranged father to lung cancer. She is a sprightly, independent library research assistant who is determined to avoid the matronly image and cling to her youth at all costs. She demands that everyone including her daughter, Ife, and grandson, Stanley, call her Calamity. She holds nothing back (including her tongue) which has caused a long-standing strained relationship with Ife. It is revealed fairly early in the novel that a portion of Calamity's angst resides in unresolved childhood issues and events including an untimely departure of her mother resulting in her father being arrested as a murder suspect in her disappearance when she was ten. Lost love and an unplanned pregnancy at fifteen resulted in her father's emotional, financial, and physical withdrawal from her at sixteen. It is never a dull moment with Calamity. Try as she might, she is losing the battle with Mother Nature and with the encroaching onset of menopause, she reawakens a unique, repressed childhood gift to find lost things. This gift, which hilariously coincides with tingling fingers and hot flashes at the most inopportune moments, results in remnants from the past literally falling from the sky triggering a reemergence of forgotten and sometimes painful memories. Following her father's funeral, Calamity partakes in a drinking binge to wallow in self-pity on the nearby beach. She awakens to discover a "lost" child has washed ashore covered in seaweed. Careful medical examination by her childhood friend-turned- tormentor, Dr. Chow, confirms that the child is a bit "different;'" and deliberately suppresses her suspicions that he is one of the mythical Sea People. When two similar adult bodies are discovered the next day, Calamity identifies with the orphan's apparent parental loss. She names him Agway; embraces and welcomes him into her home worsening her frail relationship with Ife even more. To complicate matters further, she is suddenly overwhelmed by life: Her new love suggests opening the unsolved cold case surrounding her mother's disappearance; Ife's marriage is in shambles spawned by arguments with her husband surrounding the upcoming election and the heated political factions facing the island's tourist trade; Ife's father, her first love, comes to visit and brings his new lover; Stanley needs her assistance to complete his school project; endangered, indigenous seals are missing from the local zoo; and last, caring for a rambunctious three-year-old "merboy" who loves to eat raw shrimp is putting her close to the edge! It may sound a bit convoluted but it is not; the author does an excellent job of lacing the plot threads together and it all comes together beautifull

At age 53, Calamity Lambkin's life is unraveling at the seams. Beginning "the change of life" and grappling with the loss of the father she nursed for the past two years, she is unprepared for her past materializing out of thin air. It seems that the onset of menopause has reawakened the "finding" gift Calamity possessed as a youth. Only now, the lost items come to her--everything from her favorite stuffed animal, which literally falls from the sky, to her father's cashew grove, which appears one evening in the yard of her new home. Things become even more complicated as Calamity investigates her father's past and then finds a mysterious 3-year-old boy, who may be one of the sea people, washed up on the beach. Her caring for him as her own son causes problems with her own grown daughter and young grandson. A fiercely independent woman, the novel's protagonist became a single mom at age sixteen. As an adult she eschewed her given name Chastity, for Calamity, a name she insists everyone from the local minister to her own daughter use. A very real character, Calamity is fraught with imperfections: honest to a fault, she curses like crazy and has unknowingly cultivated a hard heart caused by her love for an unobtainable man. Set in the lush West Indies and imbued with their culture and unique problems, The New Moon's Arms is a mesmerizing book. Hopkinson deftly handles both the mystery of the sea people and the anomaly of the local Mediterranean monk seals, adding fantastical and historical elements to both. In only one area does one's suspension of disbelief begin to falter. Hopkinson has turned her thee gay/bisexual characters into "saints." Each is horribly mistreated by Calamity, yet forgives her with barely a second thought. That one of them would forgive her is plausible, but that all three of them do--with nary a grudge--is unrealistic, as is the fact that one of them would agree to baby-sit for her just days after he'd been kicked out of her house under a torrent of abuse. Armchair Interviews says: Nalo Hopkinson's fourth novel continues the fine work of "one of most impressively original authors to emerge in years."

Reviewed by Beverly Pechin for Reader Views (1/07) The author does a wonderful job of combining a bit of fantasy with a touch of romance and just a dab of reality to create a story with such great depth that the reader is carried away into a whole new world. Chastity never really had it "good." A teen mother, pregnant from her first sexual encounter, she lived in the shadows of a world that never seemed right. Her mother disappeared from her life with no real answer as to what happened. Her father was always rather aloof about her life, sometimes showing signs of truly caring for her while in the next breath making her feel as though she was worthless. Her best friend had become her worst enemy. She lived in poverty and never knew the real world in any other way then what she saw from her own tarnished heart as she grew up. Fast forward to a time when Chastity becomes "Calamity," even if everyone on the island won't call her by the new name she's chosen to use. She deals with the death of her father, the too typical lack of finances, a romantic situation that she's not so sure if she should welcome or run from and top it off with "the change of life." Could anything else go wrong in her now crazy life? Well of course. Add on another complete stranger, attractive, sexy and younger that sweeps her off her feet. And if that's not enough, save the life of a child who washes up from the sea and feel the need to be there for the child. Calamity finds herself becoming a mother again as she opts to care for this special little boy who's parents were found washed up from the sea dead. But this is no ordinary boy. Calamity has always had a sixth sense about her and it seems like this is just the beginning of this sense going rampant through her body. Is it the fact that she's going through menopause or is there more to it than meets the eye? Suddenly, things from the past appear out of nowhere. Her childhood toys drop from the sky. Whole groves suddenly are growing in an orchard that had long since been left to its own despair. Her pantry is suddenly filled to the ceiling, but not because she filled it. Realizing that some of the mysteries of the island she has grown up on could possibly be truth, she takes on a whole new direction in life at a moment when most are realizing their life is no longer able to be changed. The boy she's rescued seems to truly be "unique" in a way that only certain locals can understand and she knows she has to protect him from the real world around them. Can she end up saving this child and making him live a "normal" life? Does she really want to? And what about the 2 lovers she's attracted to? Which one should she choose? And can she ever make amends with her own daughter for the choices she made as a teen mother? Can she let go of the pain she's carried with her throughout her entire life? As she deals with family issues and issues of her own maturity, Calamity finds that nothing in her world is what it seems and m