Magical realism – BG's Reads

This title, The Princess of Thornwood Drive by Khalia Moreau, was brought to my attention by a cousin of mine living in Trinidad. The author, the daughter of my cousin’s close friend, was born in the United States and moved to Trinidad for part of her primary and high school years and is now a medical doctor living in the States. This title is also the Editor’s Pick for best science fiction and fantasy at Amazon Books. Honestly, I really enjoyed this read.

This creative, moving and sometimes suspenseful novel deals with loss, love and family ties. The bond between two sisters, 22-year-old Laine and 18-year-old Alyssa, is explored, tested and stressed as they occupy different realities after a tragic car accident. Each chapter alternates between these realities, one modern-day and the other a parallel magical, fantasy world.

Twenty-two year-old Laine is left alone with the responsibility of caring for her disabled sister and trying to keep the family home. She had to leave college, works in a coffee shop and also gives horse riding lessons part-time. Unbeknownst to Laine, Alyssa, who is confined to a wheel chair and non-verbal, is in fact functioning in an alter realty, a place called Mirendal, where she and her family are royalty. In Mirendal, Laine and Alyssa’s parents, the King and Queen, are in danger in the Dark Forest after an attack (the accident). Alyssa, cursed as a changel, is trying to find her parents and also warn her sister of the danger they are all in.

Now, while reading I’m thinking that Alyssa is immobile and non-verbal, but is this where her mind is, in this world of Mirendal? She goes to a daycare facility daily and the caretakers drug the patients when they become violent or troublesome. When she is drugged, Alyssa goes further into different planes/realities of this magical world. Here in other planes, she meets creatures that help in her search for her parents. She can communicate with the other disabled, non-verbal patients in this fantasy world as well – they are also cursed changels. This is Alyssa’s reality while locked in a non-functioning body.

To complicate things, Laine meets two men who may be interested in her – a doctor who frequents the coffee shop where she works and a therapist from the daycare Alyssa attends. From contact with the therapist at the daycare, Alyssa is convinced that this therapist is dangerous, means her and Laine harm, so she believe she must find a way to warn her sister.

While spending time with the therapist, however, Laine does find out that he may be dangerous and that he may have abused her sister at the facility – he takes trinkets from patients. She found something of Alyssa’s in his apartment. This therapist, Laine fears, is using the facility as cover to abuse the vulnerable and she has to find a way to stop him.

The bond between Laine and Alyssa is quite strong, very moving. The author, through her life experiences, personal and professional, gives the reader her own perspective of what brings family together through love and loss and also of patient care, physical and mental – I suggest you read the author’s note. The fantasy, alter-reality elements of this novel are captivating, as well as emotional and incorporate some elements of Trinidad folklore – nice to read for a change.

In my view, reading The Princess of Thornwood Lane may lead you to ask the questions – What is happening, if anything, when you can’t reach a person by communicating – is the person active in any way? Are they aware of you trying to reach them and unable to respond, basically trapped in their non-functioning body? Again, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel by talented author, Khalia Moreau. I hope you pick up a copy and give The Princess of Thornwood Lane a read.

Halloween month – graveyards, the dead, the unexplained. The title When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, takes place on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, the locations and places within the novel are fiction, however. The author is from Trinidad and Tobago – it’s her first novel. I was looking forward to reading this one, since my family is from Trinidad.

This mystical novel opens as an elder, Catherine, tells her granddaughter, Yejide, how the forest changed during a war with animals and man, with parrots changing to the Corbeaux – flesh-eating birds, to balance the living and the dead.

Darwin, a young man from a village in the country, travels to the city of Port Angeles, for the first time to find work at the island’s government office. He is assigned to a cemetery as a gravedigger. This type of work goes against his Rastafarian upbringing of not dealing with the dead, but he desperately needs the work to help his ailing mother, even though she rather he did not leave his village to do this kind of work. She is afraid he will end up like his father, who years ago went to the city to work and, without a word, never returned.

The author alternates chapters between Yejide and Darwin, describing their childhoods, their relationships with their mothers. Both Yejide’s grandmother and mother have passed. Her grandmother, Catherine, passed when she was a child and she was never close to her mother. Her mother seems very angry and resistant to her place in life. It’s her mother, however, who tells Yejide of their relationship to the dead, which is the opposite of Darwin’s beliefs. Her mother tells her that the living must take care of the dead, so they can be at peace and in turn, the dead take care of the living.

After her mother dies, the gift of seeing and communicating with the dead, that has been shared by generations of women in her family, is passed on to Yejide, who like her mother, is resistant to receiving this gift. She can see people’s light or energy; she can see death. As she receives this gift, she travels to a cemetery and sees a young man alone in this cemetery and he sees her.

Darwin struggles with working in the graveyard among so many dead. His first grave digging assignment is difficult, emotionally and spiritually, taking something from his spirit. He feels he is betraying his beliefs. He also thinks he’s seeing things as well that aren’t real, but he’s not sure – a young woman at the gates one evening, a Rasta man walking through the grounds and also fresh graves that his crew did not dig.

Yejide travels to Darwin’s cemetery to make arrangements to bury her mother. Darwin is summoned to escort her to her family’s plot – they recognize each other immediately and feel a connection. He worries about getting involved with her, while having questions about her and also about the mysterious events happening at the cemetery.

Darwin soon finds out about the fresh-looking graves in the cemetery – bodies are delivered to the cemetery at night for his crew to bury and they are also grave robbers. As Darwin is pulled into this scheme, he gets in trouble with his crew of gravediggers, who will have no problem getting rid of a young guy from the country that they believe no one will miss.

Darwin and Yejide find closure and understanding of their family’s pasts as they find a path toward each other. The language of the novel, the storytelling, which was always oral in my family at least, is familiar and refreshing to read in book form. The ending literally choked my up, so, please give When We Were Birds a read. I’m looking forward to see what the author, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, comes up with next! And for the Trini’s reading this post – please give this novel a read and let me know what you think!!

Side comment, I had to publish from my phone today, due to a wifi outage at home. So, couldn’t do all the optics I wanted.

Category: Magical realism

The Princess of Thornwood Drive by Khalia Moreau

When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo