Brown Girl in the Ring

I've been working on trying to read genre fiction written by women and nonbinary people that have been nominated for several awards, and Brown Girl in the Ring is up there as one of the most nominated genre novels of the last 20 years.

I listened to Brown Girl in the Ring on audio and while I mostly enjoyed the story, I enjoyed it despite the narration, not because of it. The narrator did a lot of dialect work that I found distracting and just didn't click with me. It felt almost cartoonish at times.

It was really interesting to read a novel that's centered on Afro-Caribbean folklore. I really enjoyed that. But each chapter began with a lyric from a children's song or repeated phrases from children's stories, and again, I found it distracting and it kicked me out of the narrative. It probably wouldn't have bothered me as much in print. I'm excited to pick up more of Nalo Hopkinson's work, just maybe in a different medium next time.