A love story between a man and woman. A love for the ancestors. A love for death. A love for family. A love for the natural ecosystem. A love for life.

This book is just love in every sense, and I’ve never experienced the feelings I get. It makes me want to seek love in all things even more. It is a must read. Just perfection.

Even though this book is fiction, something about it feels real, feels true, feels authentic. Thank you, Ayanna, for such a beautiful story. ( )

Lovely, immersive writing. I just really enjoyed the building of these characters and their worldscape. ( )

The story of Yejide and Darwin, who are opposites and find love together. Darwin is raised as a Rastafarian, so cannot be around death. Yejide inherits a gift from generations of her foremothers that allows her to shepherd people to their death. When Yejide’s mother dies, they find each other. Darwin is working as a grave digger , the only job he can find. he discovers his coworkers are raiding graves for jewelry and providing a hiding place for bodies in fresh graves. Difficult to follow since it is written the way people talk and they seldom
use tenses and sentence construction is often non-standard. ( )

My rating for this book is about a 3/3.5 out of 5. It was enjoyable, but for some reason, it took me a while to get through it. The book was very well written, it really pulled you in to the setting. The descriptions were all so lush and vivid, it not only did a good job enabling you to feel present in the story, but it also showed the author’s love for the country. I also really enjoyed how the entire book, not just the dialogue, was written the mimic the speech patterns of Trinidadians. Would you call it creole, or a dialect? I just enjoyed it when I got over my initial confusion, though that might make it more difficult for some readers to get through the book.

I feel like marketing the book as a “love story” was overselling the romance aspect of the book. To be perfectly honest, I feel the book didn’t need the romance. It worked fine with it, but it would have worked just as fine without. The romance sort of falls into the “insta-attraction” category, and while it didn’t feel unrealistic (or more unrealistic than the fantasy book calls for) based on the book being called a love story, I thought it would be more present, or there would be more showing Yejide and Darwin getting to know each other and fall in love.

The characters were all interesting, and I personally enjoyed how it felt like we only got a small part of their life. You could tell that the characters had lived a lot before the book started and would live a lot after it ended, and the ones with a small presence in the story it was felt that they had their own lives going on off page.

To me, the biggest drawback was that I feel Darwin’s storyline kind of faded out. I wish more had been done with it towards the end. It didn’t really have a satisfactory conclusion. And if we’re being honest, it didn’t really feel like there was a need to combine the two stories. They worked well on their own, and the merging didn’t feel necessary. Darwin’s plot didn’t get the attention and ending it needed, I feel. And though I wouldn’t necessarily mind if it was all leading back to Yejide and her storyline and her character arc, I just didn’t get the feeling that her presence was needed in his story or that it completed it to a satisfactory degree. It wound up getting rid of what could have been a very good villain very quickly and easily and in a way that i think diminished their impact. In my opinion, I think it could have been stronger if it had been a duology or trilogy. If the stories had spent a book or two completely separate setting themselves up, and then spent about a book or show intertwined with the main characters working together, then I think we could have gotten something really great.

Overall, I think the book was very good, I just wish for a more satisfactory ending, and more of a justification for combing two stories into one. ( )

Review coming. 2022 read. ( )