Brown Girl in the Ring in The Alternative Worlds

Apr 18, 2009 Brad rated it really liked it

Shelves: dystopian, sci-fantasy, zombies, read-in-2018

Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson's first novel, is an impressive work of imagination. Her Haitian dominated near future Toronto is alive with sights and sounds and smells. Her world of Caribbean magics slamming into cutting edge medical tech really works, channelling a little bit of the old RPG Shadowrun but replacing information for organs. I would recommend it to anyone who loves Sci-Fi or Fantasy or Sci-Fantasy.

But I can't muster much more from my personal response than, "That was okay ...more

13 likes · Like · see review

Aug 14, 2012 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, speculative-fiction

Brown Girl in the Ring starts with a vision of a dangerous, walled off near future Toronto; as a once and future Torontonian I'll admit I found this disturbing. It's a dangerous and disturbing book, full of death and gore, but also gods and magic and a culture I know very little about, and a wonderfully flawed protagonist. I love that even though it contains all of those things, the scope of the story is small. There's one big-picture subplot that felt a little shoehorned in, though it did feed ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Sep 13, 2007 Wealhtheow rated it it was ok

Shelves: race, urban-fantasy, post-apocalyptic, pocmaincharacters, fantasy

I met the author at ThinkGalacticon and really liked her, so I gave her first book a try. It's awful. I disliked all of the characters, the plot was so simple it was almost unreadable, and the dialog was in dialect, with which I have a real problem. ...more

3 likes · Like · see review