Descend- First Steps

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Descendants: Rotten to the Core • Evil Like Me • Did I Mention • If Only • Be Our Guest • Set It Off • Believe the beautiful jamaican locale is a real part of the atmosphere here, along with whip smart local characters who leave a charismatic impression on you.

Ward used magical realism to heighten the mythical and fabulist framework of the book. I commend her for stretching the story to boundless limits, for using motifs of Dante’s poem and inserting her own magical elements. I admit to a gulf between me and the otherworldly mystique of these characters and events, perhaps the same way that the bible can distance me with hyperbole. However, I feel blessed to get my hands on anything that Jesmyn Ward writes. Isle of the Lost • Dragon Hall • Auradon Prep • Auradon • Neverland • Ursula's Fish and Chips • Lady Tremaine's Curl Up and Dye • Hades' Cave Overall, Let Us Descend is an enchanting blend of historical facts, powerful fiction, and heart-wrenching emotion that does a wonderful job of reminding us that even under the most cruel and barbaric conditions, humanity can be incredibly resilient, compassionate, and kind.

In September 2020, as COVID-19 swept across the country, Jesmyn Ward wrote an essay for Vanity Fair entitled, “On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic” after the death of her 33-year-old husband just months before the murder of George Floyd. The essay gutted me; I have rarely read anything so powerful. Within the essay, she writes this: “Even in a pandemic, even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time.” Because I don't want to tire you out anymore and give you acute Crichtoniasis, I'll talk briefly about this one.

Descendants 3: Good to Be Bad • Queen of Mean • Do What You Gotta Do • Night Falls • One Kiss • My Once Upon a Time • Break This Down • Dig a Little Deeper Annis learns that her grandmother was a woman warrior married to a rich king who had many warrior wives. Every month, Annis’ mother took her to the woods and taught her to fight, to defend herself, to rise up. Mama educated Annis on the poignant saga of her family, to give her something that no slaveholder can take away—the story of her origin. Whew. The writing is superb. I believe I have exhausted all the adjectives that describe prose, and so I’ve coined a new term that kind of encapsulates all the great things we say about prose. And that term is prosey. Yes, when you want to say the prose is fabulous, fantastic, poetic, lyrical, otherworldly, now I’ll just simply say the prose was prosey!!! And in the case of Jesmyn Ward and this book, she is at the tippy top when it comes to prose. Along the journey, a weather spirit carrying the name of Annis’s grandmother appears to her. At times rejecting the spirit’s guidance and at other times seeking her protection, Annis begins to learn, through a careful piecing together of memory, how to create her own version of freedom. Let Us Descend – the title, from Dante’s Inferno, reflects the hell its characters experience – doesn’t break new ground in fiction about slavery (unlike Morrison’s Beloved, Butler’s Kindred or Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad). But it’s the internal journey of Annis that makes it in the end worthwhile, as she matures, from suffering the weapon of her mother’s hand to developing her own resourcefulness and strength. “I am the weapon.”

As Uma readies for the high seas alongside Harry, son of Captain Hook, Gil, son of Gaston, and the toughest rogues on the Isle of the Lost, the reformed villains of Auradon devise their own master plan, and with King Ben away on royal business, they won't have to play by all the rules. Using bad for good can't be totally evil, right? Annis is the daughter of a slave owner and her enslaved mother. After working in their master's home, her mother takes Annis into the trees and teaches the lessons her own mother once taught her. Annis suffers heartbreak and tremendous loss after her mother is sold and is eventfully sold herself. She and other slaves set out on a gruesome and unforgiving walk from the Carolinas to New Orleans. They will suffer greatly both mentally and physically along the way. Annis is bought and taken to a Louisiana sugar plantation where her life will change once again. Annis has hidden strengths and the eye of Aza, the goddess is always upon her. Annis resolves to make her own way in life and not to be beholden to any one.

I highly recommend this book to all who enjoy historical fiction but with the caveat that it contains a large element of magical realism. I found that fit in beautifully with the character and actions of Annis and her story of trying to exist in a world that doesn’t see her as a person at all. James McGregor is a professional diver hired to recover some important items aboard a sunken yacht off the coast of Kingston by the wealthy and secretive Arthur Wayne. The job looks to be an easy pay off until McGregor discovers the yacht he’s to investigate hasn’t sunk yet. GRAVE DESCEND is a solid, ever-twisting detective tale reminiscent of the dime-store pulps. The plot is engaging and accommodates the ever changing face of evil perfectly. With McGregor knowing full well the dive may be his last, the battle for survival is rife with bloodshed, double crosses and hidden agendas. Pretty soon, though, her mother is sold, Annis is alone, and then she herself is chained to her fellow enslaved people and taken on a long trek to Louisiana. The world is rendered in a careful lyrical style – the march is “this wide, cry-choked hell”; Annis’s light complexion is “the middle mud of my skin” – but this is where the trouble for the reader begins. There is a genuinely exciting escalation of action and struggle toward the end Among them are books published for the first time such as Joyland and The Colorado Kid by Stephen King.Prior to her forced exit, Annis met another enslaved girl, Safi, and the two had become deeply bonded. For Annis, without her mother or Safi, she is caught in a blind and bleak world of the damned. The landscape of her life is often infernal, forlorn. Every generation, there comes along a storyteller who doesn’t just tell the story of America, but who sings it. Jesmyn Ward is one such griot. She spins sentences made of silk that land solid as stone. In this story about the love of women—a mother’s love, a mother’s mother’s love, and a daughter’s trust—readers are gathered together in the name of hope.