He Drown She In the Sea by Shani Mootoo

This weekend I read He Drown She In the Sea. This is a brilliant book by Shani Mootoo. The story is wonderful and the storytelling delightfully paced and interesting. I fell right into the book and loved Mootoo’s writing from the beginning. She is incredibly inventive and has many lovely turns of phrases. The book is the story of love lost between two people separated by class, families, and ultimately continents. It also explores the ways colonialism impacts people with its narrative split between an imaginary Caribbean island and Canada. This novel is both entertaining and enormously satisfying, although I hope that Mootoo’s next book is the story of Cassie, the daughter of one of the main characters who I imagine is a lesbian. Her story is not central to this book, but I would like to hear her full story.

You can read some of Mootoo’s work over at Lodestar Quarterly (which has sadly stopped publishing) and article about her and an interview with her in the newspaper at the University of Alberta where she teacher.