A Girl is a Body of Water

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by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

“Promise me you will pass on the story of the first woman – in whatever form you wish.  It was given to me by women in captivity.  They lived an awful state of migration, my grandmothers.  Telling origin stories was their act of resistance.  I only added on a bit here and a bit there.  Stories are critical, Kirabo,”she added thoughtfully.  “The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us.”

Stories and women are deeply entwined themes in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s A Girl is a Body of Water.  Throughout the novel, we follow Kirabo, who is a twelve-year-old girl at the beginning, as she comes of age during Idi Amin’s dictatorial regime in Uganda during the 1970s.  Kirabo is the storyteller of her family, but she is also desperately searching for her mother and her mother’s story. 

Kirabo lives with her grandparents and a slew of aunts, uncles, and cousins on her grandfather’s farm.  She has no idea who her mother is and her father, whom she calls by his first name, Tom, only periodically comes around to visit her before heading back to the city. Her grandfather is wealthy and well-respected landowner in their village. Kirabo’s family surrounds her with love.  Yet she longs to learn about her mother, about whom no one will speak. This doesn’t help her control what she calls her “second self,” a mischievous spirit that lives within her and periodically takes over her body, causing her to fly and roam without really remembering what happened. 

Kirabo sneaks off to visit Nsuuta, a blind woman who lives at the edge of town, anxious to rid herself of this curse.  It must be done in secret, for there is some kind of unspoken history between Nsuuta and Kirabo’s grandmother.  Kirabo doesn’t know what transpired between the two, but she knows her grandmother wouldn’t approve of Kirabo going to Nsuuta.  Though Kirabo hates to disappoint or betray her grandmother, she is desperate for answers. Nsuuta seems to be the only one willing to give them.

Nsuuta tells Kirabo that her second self is really a special gift, a remnant of what she calls the “original state” of women, before men shrank them and began to control them.  Kirabo has a gift, not a curse, and she should hold on to it and treasure it. But Kirabo has other plans for her future.

Throughout the story, we meet all sorts and experience a wide range of experiences with Kirabo as she learns to navigate what it means to be a woman.  She learns about mwenkanonkano, a Uganda-rooted feminism while trying to watch out for kweluma. Nsuuta explained kweluma as:

            “when oppressed people turn on each other or on themselves and bite.  It is a form of relief.  If you cannot bite your oppressor, you bite yourself.”

Oppression is not limited to sex and gender.  At one point, the story jumps back in time to Nsuuta and Kirabo’s grandmother’s childhood and young adulthood.  They navigated similar issues as Kirabo, but with British colonialism in the background, chipping away at Uganda’s “original self.”

Makumbi’s writing is beautiful.  There were so many passages where a particular paragraph or sentence jumped out at me.  I should also mention that there are a number of phrases and sentences written in Luganda without translation.  By and large, you can figure out what’s going on from context clues, or if you have a phone/computer handy, you can look it up.  I personally enjoy having non-English language bits reflecting the author’s background or the setting of the book, but I know that’s sometimes frustrating.  I also discovered, once I finished the book, that there’s a cast of characters at the end, which might have been helpful in a few places. 

A Girl is a Body of Water also gave some insights into Ugandan history, about which I know very little.  At one point, Kirabo’s aunt complains about Amin’s dictates on how women dress.  Later, Kirabo lives through the uprising that ousts the dictator.  Some of the parts about colonization makes you realize just how bizarre things are that we Westerners take for granted.  There’s a great segment about time and the ridiculousness of starting the day in the middle of the night, rather than at sunrise, or gauging months and seasons by an arbitrary calendar, rather than following the natural world.  At the same time, Kirabo and her boyfriend also get into debates about whether certain traditions regarding women’s sexuality should be extolled for increasing women’s pleasure or thrown out as a form of genital mutilation.  

Overall, I really enjoyed A Girl is a Body of Water.  The only thing that clanged for me was Kirabo’s dilemma with her second self. I thought it would take up the entire novel and I was kind of surprised by its resolution.  The overarching themes of the importance of story, of understanding others, and trying to understand ourselves, wrapped in beautiful language and touches of humor, however, make this an outstanding book. 

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Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

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Book cover of Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher with a skeleton dog next to it.

If I had to sum up why I like Kingfisher and her books so much, it’s because she creates characters that I desperately want to know and be friends with in real life. And not just her human characters. All of the animals she brings to life are just perfect.  In her latest novel, Nettle & Bone, that includes a dog made only of bones and brought to life by magic, but who’s still just as dog as a dog can be.  (Oh, and there’s a demon-possessed chicken.)

As you might have guessed from that, Nettle & Bone is a fantasy story. Or to be more specific, a dark fairy tale.  Marra is a princess, sent to live in a convent as a backup should her sisters fail in their strategic marriages.  Her family rules a small but vital kingdom with an important port that neighboring kingdoms have long eyed.  To provide some protection, Marra’s eldest sister wed the prince of the northern kingdom.  Sadly, she died under mysterious circumstances.  The second daughter then replaced her sister as the prince’s wife.  She successfully gives birth, but to a daughter.  When Marra arrives in the castle for her niece’s christening, she makes a disturbing discovery.  Upon return to the convent, Marra realizes that she is the only person who can save her sister, and possibly her kingdom.

But she doesn’t know where to begin. “If we were men…” she thinks to herself.  However, as the powerless echo time and again:

            They were not and the history of the world was written in women’s wombs and women’s blood and she would never be allowed to change it.

            Rage shivered through her, a rage that seemed like it could topple the halls of heaven, then vanished under the knowledge of her own helplessness.  Rage was only useful if you were allowed to do anything with it.

As she is unable to transform into a dragon, it seems hopeless.  But then she realizes she could enlist the help of a dust-wife.  Dust-wives were women who lived by graveyards and worked with the dead, along with doing other general witchy things.  A dust-wife could give her the power to kill the prince.  Of course, it’s never as simple as just asking for help.  Marra must prove herself and on the way, she collects friends and allies, ready to challenge Prince Charming. 

Kingfisher creates amazing worlds and this one is no different.  The magic is fun and I love what she does with the idea of the fairy godmother.  The other two books of hers that I’ve read, The Hollow Places and The Twisted Ones, are more horror-ific (I’ll probably never forget her descriptions of the horrors of the Hollow Places), but even in those, her humor and her protagonists make you think you could handle it if they stay with you.  I’m thrilled to add Marra and her companions to that group. 

(CW: domestic abuse, miscarriage)

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Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi

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Book Bitter Orange Tree a tiled table

Bitter Orange Tree is an interesting book to review.  There isn’t a standard plot, per se.  The synopsis version is that it’s the tale of a young Omani woman, Zuhour, who leaves Oman to attend university in Great Britain.  As she adapts to life in England, she also replays her memories of Bint Aamir, the woman who had been like a grandmother to Zuhour.  Time proves to be fluid, as the book ebbs and flows between the present with Zuhour and the past with Bint Aamir.  Though only told through Zuhour’s memories, we get a fuller story of Bint Aamir’s life, from World War I until her death, which occurred as Zuhour left for her education.

Yet while Alharthi shows how time is fluid, she also emphasizes its immutability.  Our triumphs and failures, our joys and our regrets, are here to stay.  Zuhour is painfully aware of this, as she endures the memories of Bint Aamir begging her not to go.  But she recalls the words of a poet: All your tears, all your pleas, will erase not a line of that which is written. There is nothing for her to do except remember.  Throughout the story, characters wrestle with the question of what do we owe our families versus what we owe ourselves.  Is it our duty to stay at home for as long as our elders need us?  Should parents be encouraging their grown children to strike out on their own or hold them tight, pleading “don’t go”?

Multiple characters struggle with those conflicting desires. One of Zuhour’s friends at University, a young woman from a wealthy Pakistani family, struggles with whether to tell her family of her temporary marriage to a man from a poor rural village. A neighbor of Bint Aamir wanders the streets, crying for her missing son. He had simply moved from Oman to the United States. And Bint Aamir’s final words and final moments continue to haunt Zuhour.

The thing which drew me to this book, and kept me reading page after page, was the absolutely gorgeous writing.  It is a testament to both Jokha Alharthi and the translator Marilyn Booth, and it’s no surprise that language plays such a significant role.  As Zuhour tries to navigate her way through the social dictates of her new life, she finds herself occasionally letting information slip out that she would have rather kept to herself.  After one such instance, she wonders:


               Why don’t words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves? But there are no threads attached.  Those words had been said.  What’s done is done.

It is a question I’m sure nearly everyone has asked in some form or another as they internally curse their tongue for moving faster than their brain.  Later on, she muses about the “trap of language,” writing:

            At the time, was I even aware of such a thing as the trap of language?  I don’t recall.  Did I really say something to him about feeling disabled because of language.  I don’t think so.  If I Had said anything like that, he would not have noticed it anyway.  He would not have detected this trap.  He didn’t see me as disabled, bound to a wheelchair that was language’s incapacity to fully express me.  No, no.  We didn’t have any discussions about traps of any kind.

Bitter Orange Tree ends with a few lines of poetry and then lets you flow away.  But the rhythm and beauty of the language stays with you even as the cover closes. 

Find it here.

Ordinary Monsters by J.M. Miro

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Book cover of Ordinary Monster with a gauzy blue background.

In 1872, a pair of detectives (Alice Quicke and Mr. Coulton) are searching the world for Talents – children with extraordinary powers.  They take their foundlings back to the Cairndale Institute, a school and home for these ordinary monsters.  There, the children learn how to use and control their unique abilities, along with all the other basic subjects any child would learn. 

When the story opens, there are two specific children for whom the pair are searching.  Marlowe is a young boy born under tragic circumstances. His skin sometimes glows blue and he can heal or melt others. Unbeknownst to him initially, there is some kind of smoke monster stalking him.  Charlie Ovid, a teenage Black boy living in Mississippi, heals instantaneously, though he still feels all the pain inflicted upon him. 

The Cairndale employees soon find their charges, but what should be a relatively straightforward task of installing the boys in their new home is anything but.  There’s the smoke monster, lichts, and other dark forces seeking Cairndale’s secrets.  It’s up to Alice, Coulton, Charlie, Marlowe, and a handful of other Talents to disrupt their plans, while facing their own darkness as well.

Ordinary Monsters is a huge book, which is fitting for a tale that travels between Europe, the United States, and Japan.  Overall, I liked all the world building and didn’t notice the length much.  There was one section with Charlie that I felt didn’t quite fit though.  It seemed like it was setting up something else or that instead of simply getting lost in the streets of London, Charlie accidentally wandered out of his book and into one of Dickens’ before finding his way back.  It didn’t destroy the narrative or anything and there were still some connections to the larger story, but it just seemed a bit out of place.

One of the things that really struck me about this book was how many times things seemed impossible or hopeless, but the characters chose to keep going or keep fighting anyway.  It’s a good reminder for all of us that sometimes we just have to keep going through, no matter how pointless it seems.  And maybe we won’t “win” or change what already happened, but there’s still a chance that we can alter the future enough that something good can come from it later.

I also really liked the historical setting.  It felt very realistic, even with the magic sprinkled all around the world.  Yet again, the Pinkertons popped up, but like in The Devil’s Revolver, they’re still a bunch of bastards.  Again, realistic.  Alice is definitely my favorite character, both for her ability to get the job done and her annoyance with the restrictions society places on her.  In some ways, she reminded me of Sara Howard from The Alienist (another book I greatly enjoyed). 

From what I’ve seen, it sounds like Ordinary Monsters is the first of a series.  While I’ll check out any sequels, I thought this worked well as a stand-alone novel.  It took me a bit before I got to a point where I didn’t want to stop reading. Once that hit, I was stuck in my usual tug-of-war between wanting to hurry through to see what happens next and not wanting it to end. 

So if you’re looking for a thick book with magical kids, Victorian settings, some globe-trotting mysteries, and humor mixed with some light horror, Ordinary Monsters may be for you!

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When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

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The cover of When Women Were Dragons, with toy dragons set around it.

“For Christine Blasey Ford, whose testimony triggered this narrative” – with this dedication, When Women Were Dragons hooked me.  And it kept me so all the way through.  There are myriad themes in this book, which I’ll get to.  But at its heart, this is a book about rage and women experiencing and living that rage. 

“You will tell people that you did not raise me to be an angry woman, and that statement will be correct.  I was never allowed to be angry, was I? My ability to discover and understand the power of my own raging was a thing denied to me.  Until, at last, I learned to stop denying myself.”

So writes a housewife from Nebraska, shortly before she dragoned in 1898, according to the opening document of the novel.  An ordinary housewife, married to an abusive and terrible man, spontaneously transformed into a dragon and flew away.  Sporadic dragonings happened throughout history, but authorities quickly squashed any news or evidence regarding it.  Until April 25, 1955, when hundreds of thousands of women in the United States, mostly wives and mothers, all transformed into dragons throughout that day.  Homes physically destroyed, families ripped apart, and a number of men eaten or immolated by dragon fire – it was a day that could not possibly be forgotten.

That didn’t mean people wouldn’t try.  Our narrator, Alex Green, was a young girl when her aunt dragoned, leaving behind a baby girl of her own.  Alex’s parents took the girl in and quickly set to work convincing Alex that her cousin Beatrice was her sister and always had been. Alex was not to ask questions or say anything about the dragons (who had flown off and disappeared) or her aunt (who didn’t exist, after all) or anything related to either topic.  But Alex remembered.

At the same time, the House Un-American Activities Committee (infamous for its persecution of suspected Communists, giving us the likes of Joe McCarthy) sought to silence any attempt by scientists to explore the phenomenon in any greater depth.  Since the Mass Dragoning was too large to ignore, the government issued a brief, sanitized overview of the event, and then worked hard to make sure that everyone just let it drift in the fogs of history, out of sight, out of mind.  But there remained scientists determined to learn the truth.

The book follows Alex’s personal journey towards understanding, interspersed with testimony by the lead scientist hauled in front of HUAC. Barnhill does a great job of weaving in the cultural pressures to keep anything related to the feminine as quiet and hushed as possible. 

Dragoning is dangerous precisely because it is both closely tied to the feminine while also displaying emotions that are deemed distinctly unfeminine.  Rage is at the heart of dragoning, it seems.  Women’s rage over being kept in the home, of having little to no recourse against violent husbands or boyfriends, of being told that their sexuality should be limited to “wifely duties,” of constantly being told to take up less space, less, time, less sound.  A dragon is not less.  She is large.  She is strong.  She is powerful.  She can gobble up or incinerate those who would harm her.  She can come and go as she pleases.  She does not conform. 

In addition to these meditations on women’s circumscribed emotions and options in the 50s, dragoning serves as a metaphor for LGBTAQ+ experiences.  Many of the women who dragon saw it as a way to fully embrace their true selves.  The research papers sprinkled in make mention of dragons who people had previously seen as men.  Other individuals nearly dragoned, but in the end stayed human for a variety of reasons. Dragoning is both hugely public and intensely personal.

There was only one thing that kind of clanged for me in this book.  The dragons themselves.  By which I mean, the abilities and properties of being a dragon in this world wasn’t clear to me.  They seemed to be able to do and be whatever was most convenient for the moment.  While most dragons flew to remote places on Earth, some went into space, exploring the galaxy, apparently being able to fly well past the speed of light.  Maybe it’s all the sci-fi I’ve imbibed over my life, but for some reason, that irked me.  However, it is a very very very tiny thing in the grand scheme of an excellent book.  So to paraphrase the theme from Mystery Science Theater 3000 “just repeat to yourself it’s just a [book], I should really just relax!”

“You brought me here, gentlemen, in hopes of conquest – in an attempt to rein in this feminine largeness, to shrink it down and force it to acquiesce to your paternal control, to allow our culture to forget that any of this dragon business ever happened.  This, my friends, is an impossibility.  While it is true that there is a freedom in forgetting – and this country has made great use of that freedom – there is a tremendous power in remembrance.  Indeed, it is memory that teaches us, and reminds us, again and again, who we truly are and who we have always been…

            “Personally, I think it’s rather marvelous.”

So do I. 

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