She’s ready for a vacation at her happy place-the Maine cottage she and her friends visit every summer. So they keep it a secret from their friends and families-in fact, Harriet barely even admits it to herself, focusing instead on her grueling hours as a surgical resident. They’ve been part of the same boisterous friend group since college, and they know that their breakup will devastate the others and make things more than a little awkward. Wyn Connor and Harriet Kilpatrick were the perfect couple-until Wyn dumped Harriet for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand. Her novel carves out a place in the canon of memorable works of magical realism alongside Midnight’s Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it's also totally itself, a raunchy, sly, colorful exploration of individual and collective identity.Įxes pretend they’re still together for the sake of their friends on their annual summer vacation. Ross, who lives in England and was raised in Jamaica, wheels kaleidoscopically through different points of view and backward and forward in time, offering readers a cross section of her invented country: its politics, religion, economy, food. When a blast of magic affects all the island’s women at the same time, it brings these characters together in new ways and changes everyone’s understanding of love and community.

Sonteine appears to have no cors while her twin brother, Romanza, has brought equal consternation to their powerful family by becoming acolyte-and lover-to an “indigent” man, a class of citizen who lives off the land. Xavier’s cors is the ability to conjure any flavor into food with his hands he is the country’s 'macaenus,' chosen by the gods to feed every citizen once, at the right time: 'a man born to cook just for your individual appetite….He gave you what you needed, and that wasn’t just food: it was inspiration.” As the novel opens, Xavier has been tapped by Popisho’s governor to cook for his daughter, Sonteine, and her fiance on their wedding night-out of turn for a meal from the macaenus.

They become acolytes to those who can teach them skills or are assisted by obeah women, whose “sole purpose was to curate magic.” For Anise, her cors is ironic: She is a healer and diagnostician, though she cannot heal whatever causes her own babies to be stillborn. In Popisho, every child is born with 'cors': their own particular type of magical power. Citizens of an island nation learn the ways that magic both blesses and curses their lives.

Popisho by Leone Ross