Scan barcode
A review by inherbooks
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
5.0
“See, the Shout ain’t really the song, it’s the movement. He say the Shouts like this one got the most power: about surviving slavery times, praying for freedom and calling on God to end that wickedness.”
✨
If you're reading this, it's not too late to add this to the top of your TBR.
Call me greedy, maybe selfish, I'll take it. I wanted to keep this book all to myself as soon as I finished. The need to protect and cherish, mixed with speechlessness and saltwatered cheeks kept me from writing about this historical fantasy for a few days.
In those few days, I read the book twice over and I’d do it over and over again if I wasn’t worried about the rest of the books on my shelf getting jealous.
Ring Shout is a dark historical fantasy novella written by P. Djéli Clark, set in Macon, Georgia, about a group of bad ass female resistance fighters hunting Klan demons. Yup, Ku Klux Klan demons that wreak havoc and hell on Earth in the 1920s.
The story is written in parallel to the historical events occurring at the time, including the showing of ‘The Birth of a Nation’, organ thievery, and the rich Gullah Geechee heritage to list a few. The imagery is horrific, goosebump-inducing and doesn’t hold back. But the moral and history lessons? They’re threaded in every word, phrase, sentence. In under 200 pages, you are made to unpack many components of slave trade history.
This is owed to the fact that the author is also an academic historian that studies slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world which shines in this novella. While some might consider a fantasy novel based on slavery in the Americas to be a trivialization of the past, they couldn’t be further from the truth. I saw this to be an revisualization or reframing of the past (if you can’t see it like that, can you see it like this?) as a means to tap into another level of understanding, its atrocities as well as the privileges people continue to cash in on *today* as a direct result.
The ending was everything. Perfect, bittersweet.
✨
If you're reading this, it's not too late to add this to the top of your TBR.
Call me greedy, maybe selfish, I'll take it. I wanted to keep this book all to myself as soon as I finished. The need to protect and cherish, mixed with speechlessness and saltwatered cheeks kept me from writing about this historical fantasy for a few days.
In those few days, I read the book twice over and I’d do it over and over again if I wasn’t worried about the rest of the books on my shelf getting jealous.
Ring Shout is a dark historical fantasy novella written by P. Djéli Clark, set in Macon, Georgia, about a group of bad ass female resistance fighters hunting Klan demons. Yup, Ku Klux Klan demons that wreak havoc and hell on Earth in the 1920s.
The story is written in parallel to the historical events occurring at the time, including the showing of ‘The Birth of a Nation’, organ thievery, and the rich Gullah Geechee heritage to list a few. The imagery is horrific, goosebump-inducing and doesn’t hold back. But the moral and history lessons? They’re threaded in every word, phrase, sentence. In under 200 pages, you are made to unpack many components of slave trade history.
This is owed to the fact that the author is also an academic historian that studies slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world which shines in this novella. While some might consider a fantasy novel based on slavery in the Americas to be a trivialization of the past, they couldn’t be further from the truth. I saw this to be an revisualization or reframing of the past (if you can’t see it like that, can you see it like this?) as a means to tap into another level of understanding, its atrocities as well as the privileges people continue to cash in on *today* as a direct result.
The ending was everything. Perfect, bittersweet.