I would like to thank Fourth Estate for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher -Fourth Estate

Published – Out Now

Price - £14.99 Hardcover £4.99 Kindle eBook

The pale-skinned, black-eyed baby is a bad omen. That’s one thing the people on the old plantation are sure of. The other is that Miss Rue – midwife, healer, crafter of curses – will know what to do.

But for once Rue doesn’t know. Times have changed since her mother Miss May Belle held the power to influence the life and death of her fellow slaves. Freedom has come. The master’s Big House lies in ruins. But this new world brings new dangers, and Rue’s old magic may be no match for them.

When sickness sweeps across her tight-knit community, Rue finds herself the focus of suspicion. What secrets does she keep amidst the charred remains of the Big House? Which spells has she conjured to threaten their children? And why is she so wary of the charismatic preacher man who promises to save them all?

Rue understands fear. It has shaped her life and her mother’s before her. And now she knows she must face her fears – and her ghosts – to find a new way forward for herself and her people.

Conjure Women is a story of the lengths we’ll go to save the ones we love, from a stunning new voice in fiction.

Perspective is important. It is tempting to zone in on particular moments in history. When we talk of slavery there is a tendency to only focus on the southern states pre civil war – you can imagine the plantation already I’m sure as so many tales have used it. But sometimes explaining the history of what happened next is missed yet just as important and its good to remind ourselves that the end of the Civil War didn’t end racism as we see regularly on our screens every day. In Afia Atakora’s Conjure Women we visit an intriguing settlement trying to make its own way that then leads to a battle between old traditional and new belief, hope and fear.

Rue is the daughter of Miss May Belle in the slave plantation where they live her mother has a powerful role as a Conjure Woman – someone who knows old magic and remedies to cure people - not just slaves but on occasion the slave master’s household. This leaves Rue in an unusual position – her path to follow in her mother’s footsteps, able to mix with other children including her master’s daughter Varina and she is slowly realising her childhood isn’t as safe as she thought it was. We skip to after the Civil War where Rue is now ‘freed’ and lives in an exclusively Black settlement built on the ruins of the old plantation making its own way. Rue has devised a way to protect the settlement from envious white people by using the mess of the war to suggest that the old owners are still around. But a series of strange illnesses, a strange preacher and an unusual child start to pull the threads of this new settlement apart and the world outside is going to come back with a vengeance.

This story is ambitious, and I really enjoyed that Atakora is prepared to take chances. They use a non-linear back and forth plot running between the slave plantation and the new settlement to build up a growing mystery that haunts Rue and suggests the truth is coming soon. Rue is the key focus of the narrative as a child confused and only just realising that slavery will impact her life forever while in the later scenes she is fiercely protective and proud of her role as the Conjure Woman but a dreadful infection amoing the children leads to suspicion and a battle with a new charismatic preacher offering God versus the old ways Rue was taught ultimately making Rue ends up fighting dangerously to keep her own position while also she is constantly worrying that her past is coming back to haunt her . It makes her not always sympathetic but very understandable while setting up a wider mystery.

I enjoyed a lot of the atmosphere that the story creates of something secret and weird around this land. Early suggestions that Miss Mary Belle is more than expert in herbal remedies are alluded to while the new settlement is now writhed in fog and apparently haunted by a woman in white – a strange piece of southern gothic that does give the reader a sense of a strange place. Atakora does show the cruelty of slavery and its horrible unpredictability that one day you may be respected and next tortured or killed based on your owner’s mood swings. But as well as slavery we also get a look at how Black people were living post emancipation – this for me as a UK reader was something we don’t see very often and it’s fascinating how we see that freed slaves were still persecuted, and the dawning of the Ku Klux Klan are coming to the settlement’s attention in a terrible fashion. Despite that we see Back people here more as slaves celebrating religion, mourning the dead, beginning education, and finding love all of which gives the world depth.

My issue with the novel is that it is trying to do a little too much at once and rarely stays on one plot thread long enough to allow things to breathe and yet these all get in the way of pace. The ambition is to be credited but either slimming the plot threads or perhaps giving time for a story to progress may have helped pick up the novel in its later chapters. The constant back and forth makes it hard for the characters to fully come to life and I’m still not sure if Atakora successfully landed all the stories by the end.

This was an interesting tale, and I liked the ambition and range that Atakora has shown in the debut and is certainly an author I will be looking out for in the future to see what they are capable of after a promising debut tackling very difficult subjects.