Land of Love and Drowning

Finished June 4

Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

This novel, set in the Virgin Islands, is one of loss, wonder, relationships, and magic. It takes place from 1916 to the early 1970s, and has a slow pace with lush language and a strong sense of place. As the novel begins, the United States is finalizing the purchase of what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands (previously the Danish Virgin Islands) from Denmark. This sense of being American is taken seriously by the generation born around that time, including two sisters, Eeona and Anette Bradshaw, daughters of sea captain Owen Arthur Bradshaw and his wife Antoinette who is from Anegada, a smaller, less populated island. It is a feeling shared by Bradshaw's illegitimate son, Jacob Esau, by Rebekah McKenzie, a woman whose husband disappeared some time back. Rebekah reads fortunes and is widely regarded as a witch in the community. Jacob is seen and raised as a McKenzie. 

After their father's shipwreck and their mother's death, Eeona takes Anette under her care and the two are forced to move what little they now have into a poor part of town. This book follows their lives into adulthood and lives influenced by where they have come from, and the destiny predicted regarding them. Eeona is a beautiful girl who becomes a beautiful woman, and this beauty is something that she uses as needed to help her advance in life. Eeona is also scarred by her relationship with her father and her unique physical attributes. 

It is interesting to see how the island men begin to understand the racial prejudice of their new parent country when they serve in World War II, and how that same prejudice seeps into the island life, culminating in the protests and the Virgin Islands Open Shorelines Act in the early 1970s. I like learning new facts about places through fiction. 

I also liked the magic realism element here around beauty, foretelling, and the power of words. There was a natural flow to how this was revealed in the book. 

This is a novel that will stay with me for a while.