Creatures of Passage

by Morowa Yejide

Ebook, 2021

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Your library, eBooks

Description

"Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying passengers in a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash--reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw--has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the "River Man." When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys's door bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face what frightens her most. Morowa Yejidé's deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim itself."--Amazon.… (more)

Media reviews

The New York Times
In “Creatures of Passage,” a cosmic lexicon describes mundane, earthbound life. In Yejidé’s hands, the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., becomes the realm of Anacostia. The protagonist, Nephthys Kinwell, is, in one light, an alcoholic taxi driver, and, in another, a Stygian
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 ferrywoman haunted by the violent death of her twin brother, Osiris. Rising fog announces her shifts and while she shuttles passengers to and from physical destinations, she is really shuttling them through emotional states, ferrying the soul as much as the body, all while the ghost of a murdered white woman passes the time in her trunk....what is among the book’s greatest strengths, the care taken to deepen our understanding of these characters, ends up creating its greatest flaw: uneven pacing. Readers spend so much time amid the plight of the story’s victims that they can sometimes forget that there’s a hero, or three, out there capable of deliverance, of salvation. Heroes just as tragic and unlucky and compelling as the people they’re trying to save....The head-hopping from one character’s point of view to another’s, the way the narration swoops from cosmic heights to the worm’s-eye view of the physical damage wrought by the “white ravage,” the expansive and mythic language, the presence of otherworldly wolves and underwater communities alongside kids on porches and police cars and school nurses, all these otherwise clashing elements become, in this cast, a cohesive whole, telling us that this, too, is America.
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Washington Post
Every once in a while, a novel is so compelling that it changes your sense of a place... Morowa Yejidé’s “Creatures of Passage” is that book. It is set in a mythological version of Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia, a predominantly Black neighborhood, sited on a hill across the river with
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 spectacular views of the city. Yejidé’s characters are so finely drawn, her language so lush, the city’s landmarks so cleverly repurposed within this magical setting, that the fictional place feels as real as the place itself... Nephthys drives her haunted 1967 Plymouth Belvedere as a taxi for people broken by life. She is the novel’s beating heart. Overcome with grief after her twin’s disappearance decades earlier, Nephthys numbs her pain with alcohol, and provides her passengers comfort....“Creatures” is threaded with hope and love and connection. Neighbors care for neighbors. Dash’s intuition sews a sundered family back together. The Anacostia River flows on, and the people name “the unnameable, the preposterous, and the miraculous in the kingdoms of the land.” “Creatures of Passage” is that rare novel that dispenses ancestral wisdom and literary virtuosity in equal measure.
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Publisher's Weekly
Yejidé creates a tapestry of interconnected stories of guilt, loss, love, grief, justice, and restoration as the story builds toward an intense climax involving Mercy and Dash, and one of Nephthys’s fares, known only as the “colonel’s wife,” confronts her own family tragedy. While at times
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 the book can feel didactic, with the characters very obviously meant as metaphors for historical trauma, Yejidé’s prose is often stunning. At its best, the story’s rich texture evokes the ghost stories of Toni Morrison.
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Kirkus Reviews
In which late-1970s Washington, D.C., is reimagined as an enchanted land populated by changelings, phantoms, seers, waking nightmares, and at least one haunted car....both mystic visions and real-life horrors converge into a sequence of disquieting revelations from the past and alarming prospects
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 for calamity in the future unless Nephthys and her own spiritual powers can set in motion the hard, necessary work of placating the dead and rescuing the living. Historic detail and mythic folklore forge a scary, thrilling vision of life along America's margins.
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Awards

Women's Prize for Fiction (Longlist — 2022)
NPR: Books We Love (2021)
Great Reads from Great Places (2023)

Language

English

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