The New Moon’s Arms

I was looking for some SF&F to recommend to some local PoC friends, and naturally one of my first thoughts was of Nalo Hopkinson. Given that said friends are also a lesbian couple, and one is from the Caribbean, I zeroed in on The New Moon’s Arms. Then I discovered that I had never reviewed it, so I re-read the whole thing.

Yes, seriously. Cheryl read a book for a second time. I know it is a bit of a shock, but it can happen.

First up, a word about the title. It comes from the phrase, “the Old Moon in the New Moon’s arms”, which describes the phenomenon of being able to see the full globe of the Moon while only a thin crescent is lit. What I think Hopkinson intended was to signal that this is a book about an unpleasant older person who becomes better thanks to the love and care of the younger people in her life.

Calamity (a name she gave herself because she hated being called Chastity) has not had an easy life. Her mother disappeared when she was young, and island gossip has always held that Calamity’s father murdered her. Calamity became a single mother as a teenager, in part because the boy she was sweet on was gay and didn’t want to marry her. It is easy to see why she fell so easily into homophobia.

But Calamity has always had a talent for finding things. Lost stuff just turns up. Following her father’s funeral, this magical power ramps up notch or two. When she finds a half-drowned boy on the beach, she decides to adopt him. Clearly she cannot manage this on her own, so she is forced to ask for help from family and friends. This means her daughter and grandson. It means her daughter’s father and his husband, who make far better parents and grandparents than Calamity has ever done. It means people who tell Calamity off for being a terrible bigot.

All of this comes to a head when we put together the mysteries of Calamity’s mother’s disappearance, the boy on the beach, and the legend of the (now extinct in our world) Caribbean Monk Seal. There is a lovely blend of Scottish folklore, marine biology and Caribbean sociology. It is very clever. It is also, I think, a book that wants to teach some of Hopkinson’s fellow Caribbean people to be better. I hope the message got through to some of them.

Title: The New Moon's Arms
By: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: Warner US
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
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