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A review by ngfs92
Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord
5.0
One of my favorite genres to read is modern retellings of folklore and fairy tales – not necessarily “The Little Mermaid” set in 2018, but ancient stories retold and reimagined through a contemporary lens. I’m also partial to fantasy, and protagonists who separate themselves from the flock with their cooking. As such, when I read the synopsis of REDEMPTION IN INDIGO, a retelling of a Senegalese folk tale where the heroine cooks with the Chaos Stick, a magical focus that controls chance, I was sold.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is not just a wonderful story on its own, the novel is rather a series of stories through which the heroine Paama moves through and returns to. Yet if Paama is the red thread that holds together these stories, Lord’s narrator, as the tailor, deserves a great deal of praise for weaving together a beautiful fiction.
The narrator tells Paama’s stories as if we the audience sit across from them, alongside many others, at a bonfire or at a speaking event. The novel begins with the narrator discussing a comment made by one of their rivals, read at first as if Lord wrote a preface to reveal her intentions writing REDEMPTION IN INDIGO. Yet the story takes shape at the bottom of the same page, with the same narrator setting the stage and outlining the cast. Lord/the Narrator paints the novel with beautiful sentences, with more focus on evoking emotional responses than imitating tactile sensations (though again Lord succeeds often). In one instance, the downtrodden poet Alton, unknowingly in the company of the Trickster, suddenly wakes up magically transformed into a wealthy, successful version of himself. The Trickster seizes the situation: "He lacked the puppeteer's power of his indigo counterpart, but he had something equally effective--the trickster's knack, which was now turned to the benign task of fooling Alton into believing in himself." There is something beautiful in the simplicity that Lord/the Narrator casually describes the moment in which a person finds strength and faith in themselves, at the same time inverting the trope that tricksters are malevolent or hindrances by their nature.
Throughout the novel, the narrator includes many of their own asides, in which they respond to the audience’s reaction to a character’s action or an event. REDEMPTION IN INDIGO’s narrator transforms the novel into a self-aware fiction that mediates the terms of its own reading. At the end the narrator highlights that many of the characters were not as “three-dimensional” or “believable” as some would want – and that is the point, that if a reader finds too much of themselves in one character, they lose sight of the parts of themselves they could recognize in another character such as the villain. Ultimately, the narrator argues, the fiction is neither a riddle to be solved nor a substitute from living life, the fiction is inspiration and allowed its own mystery.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is a beautiful self-aware novel that utilizes its medium to overcome and compensate for the potential shortfalls of written fiction. The narrator encourages the reader to ease up, both as reader and as a person, in order to open themselves to the full possibilities of the novel, and to the infinite magic of chance.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is not just a wonderful story on its own, the novel is rather a series of stories through which the heroine Paama moves through and returns to. Yet if Paama is the red thread that holds together these stories, Lord’s narrator, as the tailor, deserves a great deal of praise for weaving together a beautiful fiction.
The narrator tells Paama’s stories as if we the audience sit across from them, alongside many others, at a bonfire or at a speaking event. The novel begins with the narrator discussing a comment made by one of their rivals, read at first as if Lord wrote a preface to reveal her intentions writing REDEMPTION IN INDIGO. Yet the story takes shape at the bottom of the same page, with the same narrator setting the stage and outlining the cast. Lord/the Narrator paints the novel with beautiful sentences, with more focus on evoking emotional responses than imitating tactile sensations (though again Lord succeeds often). In one instance, the downtrodden poet Alton, unknowingly in the company of the Trickster, suddenly wakes up magically transformed into a wealthy, successful version of himself. The Trickster seizes the situation: "He lacked the puppeteer's power of his indigo counterpart, but he had something equally effective--the trickster's knack, which was now turned to the benign task of fooling Alton into believing in himself." There is something beautiful in the simplicity that Lord/the Narrator casually describes the moment in which a person finds strength and faith in themselves, at the same time inverting the trope that tricksters are malevolent or hindrances by their nature.
Throughout the novel, the narrator includes many of their own asides, in which they respond to the audience’s reaction to a character’s action or an event. REDEMPTION IN INDIGO’s narrator transforms the novel into a self-aware fiction that mediates the terms of its own reading. At the end the narrator highlights that many of the characters were not as “three-dimensional” or “believable” as some would want – and that is the point, that if a reader finds too much of themselves in one character, they lose sight of the parts of themselves they could recognize in another character such as the villain. Ultimately, the narrator argues, the fiction is neither a riddle to be solved nor a substitute from living life, the fiction is inspiration and allowed its own mystery.
REDEMPTION IN INDIGO is a beautiful self-aware novel that utilizes its medium to overcome and compensate for the potential shortfalls of written fiction. The narrator encourages the reader to ease up, both as reader and as a person, in order to open themselves to the full possibilities of the novel, and to the infinite magic of chance.