At the Full and Change of the Moon

Close on the heels of her well-received first novel (In Another Place, Not Here), Brand delivers a distinguished, visionary work, grounded in the language and legacy of her native Trinidad. Intricately structured and lyrically narrated, the novel invokes the powerful influence of hereditary forces on the far-flung descendants of Marie-Ursule, Trinidadian queen of a secret society of militant slaves. In 1823, in a supreme gesture of rebellion, Marie-Ursule orchestrates a mass slave suicide, from which only her young daughter Bola is spared. In her hideaway at an abandoned monastery on the tip of the island, Bola sinks deep into the spirit of the land and the sea. Roused from her reveries when other islanders move nearby, she has nine children with nine different men, none of whom can tame her. She shuttles her children off into the world, and it is their stories and their children's stories that make up the balance of the novel. While some voices are more memorable than others, snippets of memory tie each back to Marie-Ursule or Bola. Private Sones fights in WWI, falling into madness upon his return to the island. Cordelia, a model of maternal decorum until she turns 50, has simultaneous affairs with an ""ice-cream-freezer man"" and her seamstress. A haunting portrait of a cold, heartless hustler emerges in Priest, who roams from Florida to New York. ""He didn't feel any love for anybody.... He watched them to see if they loved him and what they would do for him if they did."" The novel ends in the present day and on a poignant note with a schoolgirl named after her great-grandmother Bola mourning her mother's death. Compressing her far-reaching tale in a tight 300 pages, Brand seamlessly fuses individual and collective identities in a work of poetic achievement. (Oct.)