At the Full and Change of the Moon by Dionne Brand
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I feel like opening a bottle of champagne and inviting the neighbours to celebrate making it through this book. It was that bad.
Most of the time I had absolutely no idea what was going on. The story kept jumping back and forth in time, making it almost impossible to keep track of the generational growth that is supposed to occur throughout the story.
On any one page I read the same sentence at least three times, each time something more was added to it, which made this story extremely difficult to read, since I could never get past the senseless repetition that is supposed to add to the poetic nature of narrating the suffering and tragedy the characters had to endure. Unfortunately, in this case it did not work at all. It took away from the opportunity for the reader to connect with the characters and really experience their stories.
The story was narrated from a third person point-of-view with the added distance of using “would” or “should”, making it impossible to attain an idea of the characters’ true dimensions. In addition, there were more than a few instances where the vivid language of describing quite natural human urges had me almost lose my lunch. I understand that the author’s intentions were to be bold and thought provoking, but these statements come across as vulgar and inappropriate. It gave the impression the author attempted to redefine the genre of Black Atlantic literature by making it unnecessarily complex and obscure, losing all the raw and intense nature that made this genre so powerful in the beginning.
That’s all I will say about this book. There are so many better stories about the topic of Black Atlantic literature, just don’t bother with this one.
