I won this book a couple years ago in a Goodreads Giveaway win and it has always been on my mind. I finally picked it up thanks to the Buzzword reading challenge. May's word was House + Home and when I was making my TBR for the words, I immediately wrote this title down and I am so glad that I did. This is now one of my favorite books of the year and I knew that it would be from the very first chapter or part.
At first, I thought it would be confusing and hard to follow because in the index, the chapters are family names and what year they lived, and the years weren't chronological. It was confusing at one point but I looked back on the index and it was fine.
This book starts off on the island of Martinique in the middle of the Caribbean. We are following a slave girl named Abeje. She lives and works on this sugar estate with her mom and her brother. Her mom is murdered one night by the Master and the rest of the village takes in the kids. One day a healer from another estate on the other side of the island comes to her village and helps heal some of the sick and the healer zooms in on Abeje and sees that she has a spiritual mark and helps her hone in on her abilities.
This first part when her mother died hurt me and made me very sad and I felt horrible for Abeje because even though she had her brother, she still felt alone in the world and I just wanted to hug her and just give her all the love.
The rest of the story is from her family members living in Canada and their lives dealing with racism, and finding their way in the world. There is LGBTQ+ representation and sexual assault and rape.
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