Indigo

by Marina Warner

Indigo is a shimmering, lyrical novel about power and transformation. Inspired by Shakespeare's magic play The Tempest, prizewinning writer Marina Warner refashions the drama to explore the restless conflicts between the inhabitants of a Caribbean island and the English family who settled it. From that violent moment in the seventeenth century when the English buccaneer Kit Everard arrives at Enfant-Beate, the islanders' fate is intertwined, often tragically, with that of the Everards. The voices that map the fortunes of those born, raised, or landed on the island pass from the wise woman Sycorax in the past, a healer and a dyer of indigo, to the native nanny Serafine Killebree, who transforms them to fairy tales for the two little Everard girls in London in the 1950s. At the center of the modern-day story is the relationship between these two young women: Xanthe, the golden girl, brash and confident, and Miranda, self-conscious and uneasy, who struggles with her Creole inheritance. When Xanthe decides they should return to Enfant-Beate to restore their fortunes, she binds the family closer to its past and awakens a history marked with passions and portents that takes the two women on very different paths of discovery. Sensuous and earthy, humorous and magical, Indigo is a novel of powerful originality and imagination.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Shakespeare, Feminism, Womens, Retellings

402 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992

About the author

Marina Sarah Warner is a British novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth.

She is a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre at the University of Essex, and gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1994 on the theme of 'Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.'

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very literary book, that had me excitedly making notes. I first added it to my TBR when I read Wide Sargasso Sea, inspired by the anticolonial 'writing back' concept. This book writes back to The Tempest, giving voices to Sycorax and 'Caliban', and expanding their world. Warner seeks to allow far more space than Shakespeare to challenge the genocidal storytelling of white supremacy, going beyond outrage (the shocked posture of white guilt) to explore magic and mystery, decentreing white, patriarchal ways of knowing and being. By way of review I will attempt to point out and sometimes examine some of these decolonial gestures.

Warner's characterisation is creative and skilful; she is adept at making the text do more than one this at a time. Serafine, a black Caribbean woman who helps Miranda's impoverished upper class family, enlivens her vivid, poetic, unconventional storytelling to the young girl with brilliant imitation and punctuates its sensuous frankness with conservative gender policing: 'something ladies should never do'. Miranda herself bargains with god for peace between her parents in versions of that weird Christian zest for austerity and self-deprivation, forgoing her favourite dessert, putting newspaper in her shoes to hurt her feet. Miranda's father, Kit, has mixed heritage and though usually read as white, was teased for his colouring at school. Miranda is described by Serafine as 'high yellow' and as she ages, constantly shifts her relationship to her blackness/whiteness. Unlike her father, she is able to confront her own racism and her openness is rewarded, she does not become a 'Maroon' unable to feel a sense of belonging.

Kit's father Ant is a decendant of the white man principally responsible for the colonisation of the island Serafine comes from and evokes richly in her stories. This is the source of the family's wealth and prestige, including Ant's fame-granting prowess in the extremely popular sport 'flinders', invented on the island, which reenacts and ritualises the colonists account of their expropriation and massacre. Kit is the child of Ant's earlier marriage; he is now married to Gillian who has recently given birth to Miranda's aunt Xanthe (Greek 'golden', as she recognises when she later takes the name 'Goldie', apparently rejecting the sign of eurocentric classism and its connotations of elitism).

Gillian is conventionally racist, but by the time this is made clear Warner has already created sympathy with her, emotionally nudging the reader to confront our own racism and complicities. Kit responds to her remarks (which she attempts to sanitise with 'not that I'm prejudiced') with a smile and a raise of the eyebrow 'but did not gainsay his stepmother', reminding us of the uses of power, since Gillian's husband is Kit's financial supporter. By the end of her Christening party, an ancient 'good fairy' godmother (who is also a princess - what I love about this book is its magpie-eyed crafting of fantasy textures from the fabric of reality) has wished Xanthe heartless, and cursed by Miranda's mother, who turns up univited wearing the mantle of the wicked witch in the form of immodest attire and a lot of water to be insatiable. This is hardly a subtle hint at her future destructive powers, but I found this book very unpredictable for one so heavily loaded with foreshadowing!

Like Serafine, the black train guard brings Miranda bodily comfort and security. Warner demonstrates how important this is to a child, the deep effect it has on emotions. The fact that these comforting services are rendered by black people draws attention to the significance of white comfort in the progress/stasis of race relations. Similarly Gillian and Ant fight over Serafine, him wanting to keep her in their service because she makes him comfortable. She makes Gillian uncomfortable, so she wishes to replace her with a white 'English' girl, someone not 'savage'. Miranda loves Serafine and wants her attention. None of these white people arguing over her considers Serafine's own thoughts and feelings about her work.

The novel changes colour (I love this device; instead of the names of the game, the flags of houses, arms and insignia, we are guided by sense data, the living island, beads on Serafine's thread) to speak in the voice of Sycorax. Until this point we have been led to assume Serafine and the train guard are the original people of the island, 'delineated by Kit's nauseatingly and ironically patronising compliment 'you're a fine people'. The sleight of hand that erases displaced first inhabitants by declaring 'native' black diasporas imported for slavery white-washes the double atrocity of colonisation. At first I worried that Warner rewrites the myth of the vanishing native, passing over this old trick with minimal narrative attention (glossing the unknown), but I doubt my judgement: my own whiteness causes me to get stuck in the zone of self-absolving outrage here, demanding rigorous truth-telling while remaining insensitive to the emotional landscape of exilic black homeland in the Caribbean. Miranda finds a stone that looks ambiguously as if it has been carved and reflects 'it was common knowledge that the original islanders had left no trace of themselves'. Warner thus refuses to provide me with the proof, the documentation that whiteness so often demands. Her white characters can't access the trace she has traced through the objective study of artefacts, only through imaginative connection, such as Serafine's tales.

The voices of Africans enter the text at this point from the far side of death. Laughingly, the drowned imagine their bodies feeding the sea and land, taking consolation from the cycle of life. However, this disturbing instrumentalisation of their bodies is disrupted by their merrymaking, as they creatively conjure new life. Their conversation and Sycorax's overhearing signify the text's shaking loose from European rationalist epistemology and the mechanistic viewpoint that denies spirit worlds and understands lifeless substances of matter, be they gold, indigo, cloth or flesh, through economic measures

Dulé, later called Caliban by Europeans, is the first African to live on the island, and he comes without culture, yet he is different to Sycorax and her people in his approach to time and history. Sycorax identifies Dulé's apprehension as similar to the Europeans'. Rather than positing a genetic memory here, Warner is suggesting that an awareness of being cut off from rootedness in land and community forces the creation of history as a line that can be broken, and that must seek redemption or completion by journeying into a future, while

the indigenous islanders could [see] the time and space they occupied as a churn or bowl, in which substances and essences were tumbled and mixed, always returning, now emerging into personal form, now submerged into the mass in the continuous present tense of existence, as in one of the vats in which Sycorax brewed the indigo

Here then is one of the metaphors indigo offers: the tonalities of time and being, shades of meaning.

(I loved how Warner amuses herself and me with Chaucerian vocabulary in the C17th section, dropping in such spicy words as 'swived' so deftly you might not even need to look them up. Do look that one up though - I think we ought to bring it back)

The original, C17th Kit, lead coloniser, has a cast and pitch of religious devotion that allows him to reassure himself that whatever he does is god's work. It's necessary to realise that the profit motive clearly driving colonisation was readily linked to Christian righteousness by the idea of the divine right of kings, the holy sanction of nation and the racial self-concept of Christians. The Europeans saw themselves as god's chosen and therefore whatever brought them prosperity and glory was good. This ideology and some of its consequences are discussed here. Kit hopes vaguely for the 'salvation' (conversion) of the islanders but makes no evangelical efforts. Meanwhile, he doesn't have a shadow of a scruple about exploiting African people as slaves to grow tobacco, cotton and sugar, referring to them in letters to his 'gentle' female cousin as 'studs' and 'brood mares' and praising their strength and resilience as he might any other machine, as if they can have no souls.

Through the eyes of the islanders, escaped Africans and deserters, the colonisers are seen differently. The 'tallow-men' are childishly stupid. They know nothing about cultivation and seem incapable of learning, and no medical skill whatsoever exists among them. They would be totally helpless without assistance. They are faithless, routinely breaking promises.

Warner explicitly notes that slaves suffer 'at the order' of white women. She contrasts events with hideously distorted white-washed accounts. Miranda and friends in Paris play a sensuous drinking game with sugar cubes; Warner emphasises thus that slavery is not over and that the history of colonialism lies heavy on the present, on the backs of the colonised, dense under the bellies of the coloniser, still floating in the cream of a thick liquid, in all our minds like fog. She critiques the appropriative, distancing gaze of photography after Sontag. References abound... when is the annotated edition coming?

Whites in conversation discuss the fate of the island saying the people are 'good-natured' but 'hopeless'. There's never any suggestion that people might try to change the world instead of the 'romantics' and 'good natured but hopeless' people who just want to live and love and laugh to their own rhythm. Miranda is made to look childish and foolish for objecting to this standpoint, but the stories of Sycorax and Serafine, Dulé and Ariel, which she is unable to call forth, show her to be right. To put aside ideals and join Sy slimeball, carefree Kit and heartless Xanthe is to embrace complicity in the disposal of the island to the profit of the descendants of the colonists - this is what we accept with the status quo.

Xanthe's gruesome pictures in the hotel she designs made me think of the gruesome opulence I sometimes see in private spaces belonging to very rich people. Bell hooks points out in her essay 'Beauty Laid Bare: Aesthetics in the Ordinary' (and in much of her work) that encounters with beauty can be sustaining and transformative, seeking to extend the relevance of art appreciation to working class black folks, and this seems to be inverted in the privileged desire to consume images of violence - the aesthetic of fascism. I'm hoping to understand this better through further reading...

Solitude is created by the violent othering of difference. Although there are many deeply felt relationships here, mainly between women, each of the main characters has to respond to a state of imposed isolation. For me this is in each case a state of colonisation, the sense of deprivation that makes Dulé climb a ladder into the air. The awkward later chapters of the book reflect the unsatisfactoriness of everything visible from this absurd position, yet Sycorax's sanction makes me more uneasy. I felt this narrative submitted too readily to the broken line of its history.

[Tessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell in love with this story long before I started reading it. As a history/lit major, Shakespeare fanatic and amateur genealogist, any blurb with the words ‘Tempest,’ ‘blood-lines,’ ‘fairytale’ and ‘colonial scars’ is enough to win me over. As predicted, it turned out to be a very engaging read.

Indigo is set in two distinct places in two very different periods of time. The primary narrative tells the story of Miranda: a tiny twig on a complex family tree of once-glorious, red-headed, cricket bat wielding colonists who settled the imaginary Caribbean Island Enfant-Béate in the Seventeenth Century. The past haunts the grey London streets of Miranda’s childhood; it is ever-present in the stories of her black nurse Serafine, the bickering between her poor, proud parents, and the aura of light surrounding her golden-white sister/aunt Xanthe. Warner then plunges us 350 years into the past, taking us back to the island and weaving a rich historical-mythical tale of its native peoples and their displacement. The novel finally returns to Twentieth Century Paris, where we witness the adult Miranda struggling to make peace with her family’s turbulent past.

This book has a lot of strong points. Importantly, Warner succeeds in tackling serious questions about colonialism whilst keeping her book upbeat, fascinating and completely readable. Her weaving of history and myth is rendered faultlessly and is almost Carter-esque in its delivery. The tone and style of her writing really appealed to me. She is especially good at evoking a sense of place; I was particularly moved by the image of the Chinese restaurants in London (“syrupy mangoes and sticky vermilion pork pieces, as well as ivory pagodas and lacy balls carved within lacy balls, and lychees of mother-of-pearl veined flesh so delicate it would defeat even their nimble carvers’ skills at counterfeiting”...wow) and the almost painfully beautiful description of the luscious tropical island. My only teeny-tiny gripe is that the third section lacked some of the force of the first two – I’d been glued to the page for 200 pages and then felt my attention waning slightly. Minor issues aside, this is a wonderful, generous, entertaining, intelligent book and wholly deserves to be better known.

[Ophelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having loved The Tempest, this novel is another breath of fresh air. It is beautifully written, so much detail and seeping with history and knowledge - an absolute delight to read. Loved how you saw characters from the play come into their own, especially Sycorax, who isn't mentioned in detail in the play. Novels like these always help me to deepen my interest for the original text, in this case The Tempest, which is one of if not my favorite play by Shakespeare. Really liked it, awesome stuff.

[Geertje · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing of Indigo was very lush, very easy to read. At the same time, the structure of the book confused me (why have the part about the early 1600s shoved in so early in the novel, but after Miranda had been introduced?), and I felt it was a little too long.

[Pip · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this complicated, intelligent book which combines two compelling storylines interlaced with references to Shakespeare's The Tempest, to convey the brutality of colonialisation and its continuing repercussions today. Unlike other reviews, I found the twentieth century episodes more compelling than the seventeenth century clash of cultures. The story of the medicine woman Sycorax, however, enthralled me and her nonchalance in the presence of harbingers of change particularly poignant. By depicting fully realised characters to portray how colonialism has negatively affected both the invader and the colonised through several generations, Warner has woven a powerful story.

[Elena Sala · Rating 4 out of 5]

INDIGO, set on a fictional Caribbean island, draws on Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST to dissect issues such as colonialism, slavery and exploitation. There is a subtle interweaving of fiction and fact, myth and history, fantasy and realism in this novel.
The plot is loosely that of THE TEMPEST retold from the perspective of Miranda, the daughter, rather than from the father, Prospero.
There are two stories being told. The first starts just before the British take over the island. Sycorax is a counsellor and healer who also develops the technology of indigo dyeing, which the British will steal from her. She is joined by a Caliban and an Ariel. Caliban is Dulé, the baby of African slaves who have been thrown overboard a slave ship and survived thanks to Sycorax. Ariel is the daughter of Arawaks who have been captured but subsequently died.
Things start to go wrong when the British under Kit Everard arrive. Everard likes to think of himself as a good Christian but he sees the ‘savages’ as inferior and the island ripe for exploitation.
The second story concerns his descendants, who now live in London. Sir Anthony Everard is an old-fashioned gentleman. His son Kit, named after his ancestor, has a daughter called Miranda. Kit’s Creole mother drowned when Kit was a boy. Now Sir Anthony has married Gillian, a British young woman, with whom he has a daughter called Xanthe. Eventually, Xanthe marries a smooth entrepreneur who works in the hotel business and wishes to impose a global culture in the Caribbean. Predictably, a new episode of colonialism is repeated, though this time the key factors are not sugar and slavery, but tourism. And things start to go wrong again.
INDIGO is an interrogation of western arrogance and a celebration of the wisdom it ignores; it is also a novel about the consequences of appropriation, in both the physical and ideological senses.
Marina Warner's work has always focused around the ways that myths, fairy tales and symbols continue to resonate in modern culture. This novel is a brilliant example of her work, a must read for all readers who love Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST. And for those interested in colonialism and myth.

[Bobbi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ive been thinking a lot about how I’d like to review books and what the rating means to me. I’d say that I’m a bit stricter when it comes to rating books than a lot of people, so a 3/5 for me is a book that a lot of people might like, but I personally didn’t and also wouldn’t recommend to others.

Indigo is a rewriting of the Tempest that attempts to tackle the problems of post- and neo-colonialism. It’s an interesting rewrite of the characters and their interactions with different colonial environments. The book is highly politicised and takes on various political problems from the dawn of colonialism to the terrorist attacks that happen later on the island that reflect real world events.

Although the idea of the book is fascinating and the prose interesting, I personally don’t like romance, and it was hard to understand the emotional shortcomings of the different relationships that happen. It seems like romance isn’t something the author was interested in, so the characters act with little to no motivation.

Another shortcoming that takes the book from a potential 4 star to 3 star rating is the amount of information packed into the pages. There is very little the author doesn’t attempt to touch on, which ultimately makes every character’s journey feel neglected.

It was an unfortunate mix of structural mistakes that could have potentially made a well-written adaptation of the Tempest.

[Renske · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't like this book. I thought it was very longwinded, as it just went on an on. After 250 pages I gave up reading because it simply didn't seem to stop and I felt I had to really struggle through the novel. Reading just took up too much precious time and eventually I lost interest in the novel.

[Pauline · Rating 3 out of 5]

certainly an interesting, at some parts beautiful read. very slow paced tho :( 3.25⭐️

[molly · Rating 1 out of 5]

i know this was written in the 90s but boy do i wish nonblack authors would stop using the n word in their writing.

and having this be a postcolonial text not just written by a white women but her engaging with slurs and some of these different racialized topics just rubbed me the wrong way and i think came across as corny/tone-deaf because it was obvious how disconnected the author was from what she was writing

also the writing was so unnecessarily complex/confusing to me, and at the end, when i thought back to what the book was trying to say, it seemed to be all fluff no substance

[B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was sceptical before reading because of all the negative comments about the story dragging out. I think the book was wonderful, a perfect complement to Fantastic Metamorphosis and From Beast to Blonde and beautifully written. I only wish I'd heard Sycorax speak more, but I suppose that's idealistic. Read this if you're interested in black feminist interpretations of fairy tales (even though this is by a white feminist).

[Valeria G. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was not at all taken by the narrative. It felt disjointed and not very meaningful.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, half historical fiction novel covering the British invasion and colonization of an imaginary Caribbean island in the late 1500s and early 1600s, with references to characters in Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Tempest”, in particular, Ariel, Caliban and the witch, Sycorax. The story also follows the Everard’s, the original founding family heirs, in the 1960s.

Sycorax’s life is well described. She willingly decides to live on her own, away from her tribe and family. She develops a good understanding of the medicinal value of plants on the island. She brings up tribe discards, Caliban and Ariel. Her life is disrupted with the arrival of English buccaneer, Kit Everard.

In London, in the 1960s, Sir Anthony Everard and his second wife, Gillian, have a daughter, Xanthe. Xanthe is six years younger than Miranda, the daughter of Sir Anthony’s son, Kit Everard. We follow the lives of Xanthe, a brash, confident, independent and rich young woman, and Miranda, who is self conscious and uneasy, and struggling with her Creole inheritance.

The book has interesting characters and good plot momentum. A very satisfying reading experience. The novel begins slowly, but after about page 50, things move along at an eventful pace.

This book was first published in 1992.

[ada ☽ · Rating 5 out of 5]

i have many thoughts, but no words to articulate them. this is a beautiful novel; it‘s intricately woven from different histories coming together. it‘s vivid, full of life; full of loss and finding identity and rich of culture. indigo takes up the contrapuntal characters of ariel, caliban and prospero from shakespeare’s The Tempest, and re-models them, gives them a shared legacy and explores their respective roles and interactions. this is a very human novel, and much more than "just" a re-writing.

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intricately spun adaptation of Shakespeare‘s ‘The Tempest’ and its colonial implications. Rich in language and characters, the novel stays far from the play’s plot to tell its own stories but does so without failing to address the ‘The Tempest’s conflicts. Four stars because there are a few too many open ends for my taste and I would have enjoyed more time devoted to the character of Serafine (but that’s a personal preference).

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book because, really, I want to applaud anyone with the ambition to use a Shakespeare play as the starting point for a novel. And this novel starts off well. I found the first half of it to be interesting and engaging, but unfortunately it seemed to lose its way somewhere and I ended up thinking that this is really a 250-page book that's been stretched to nearly 400. The other thing that began to bug me was that it does not really have anything very original to say. If you are familiar with books by Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul and other Caribbean writers, then you won't find anything new here.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dragged my feet through this, though I don't think I did so because it was bad writing. I think pandemic brain had a lot to do with why these 400 pages took me 2 weeks to finish. As an adaptation of The Tempest, this is really interesting, and I've read and watched a lot of those! I love that character names from the source text are present but aren't neatly aligned for the European characters. The backstory of Sycorax is particularly lovely. Maybe if I'd read this when my life was less chaotic and I could focus more easily I would have loved it. There were moments I loved, but my overall impression was only mediocre.

[Sandro · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know whether it is just my language abilities or the way Warner narrates this story but I simply cannot follow the plot. Although I have read The Tempest and know that Indigo is supposed to be a retelling I gave up on this. Yet, I'm open to picking it up again some time.

[Syd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Your basic historical novel dealing with colonialism. It seems the book was a bit too ambitious, and it felt very incomplete on two many of the subjects that were introduced.

[Russell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't enjoy this at all, had a real problem getting into it ....

[Kristel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reason read: July 2024 botm Reading 1001

This book was written by Marina Warner, an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. Warner's novel The Lost Father was on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1988. She has written many works of nonfictionin topics of myths and feminism. She has received many awards.

Indigo is a story set in London and the Caribbean. From Wiki; "Warner appropriates Shakespeare's original plot (of the Tempestand) and characters to fit a dual reality, spanning the 17th and 20th centuries, and the colonial sphere of the Caribbean alongside post-colonial London. She expands certain characters: for example, Sycorax, Shakespeare's dark witch, is given her own identity as indigo maker and village sage. The colonialist realities of 'discovery' and the conquering of 'new' lands are played out in the novel's first section. Finally, the characters of Miranda and Caliban (recreated as Dulé and George/Shaka) are unified in a shared acknowledgement of past colonial wrongs.

The novel explores the history of colonialism, family bloodlines, and power and transformation across three centuries. I found the writing hard. Her sentences required one to read slowly because you could easily get lost and not really understand what she was saying. She also used quite a few uncommon words that required one to look them up. She made up a game called Flinders which embodies the spirit of the empire. This made me think of Rowlings and her Quidditch. Symbols in the book could be the water (also found in the title) and drowning. Warner also develops the female characters of the tempest more than others who have retold the Tempest.

I am glad to finally have this book read but it wasn't easy and will not be high on a list of books that I would want to reread though I am sure a person would get more out of it with a second read.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Marina Warner examines the impact of colonialism across the centuries. Kit Everard lays claim to a remote Caribbean island, despite the presence of indigenous people including the healer Sycorax and her adopted children. Many years later, the extended Everard family confront the family legacy and seek to reconcile their differing attitudes to the island and their past.

This is a very intricate and literary work combining lyrical language with a powerful examination of colonialism that avoids sweeping interpretations of its impact but rather shows the complexity of issues that have changed and compounded over time from a variety of perspectives. It is also a compelling story of family relationships.

I found the timeline in the 17th century more engaging than the modern one, it was brutal but very powerful and the symbolism of the indigo production was fascinating. The modern sections set in London had less immediacy and sense of danger and the spoilt wealthy family were slightly irritating, but when some of them return to the Caribbean the pace picks up again and the clash of power dynamics becomes increasingly intense.

Overall this was an original and beautiful story that shows the impact of colonialism on the individual.

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miranda Everard is an English descendant of a family who once owned slaves and sugar plantations on a Caribbean island. One timeline follows her free life in 1960s London, while the other focuses on women of the island in the 17th century when Kit Everard and his crew first arrived and established a base there.

I enjoyed this, although I struggled to get into the first part where Miranda is a child torn between her warring parents, her blinkered grandfather and her new half-aunt who is more like a younger sister. I preferred reading about the older Miranda and the 17th-century island story, which I thought was the backbone of the novel.

The focus on both colonial and modern exploitation of natural resources was interesting and ahead of its time, and I assume that this was informed by Warner's own family history with ancestors who owned Caribbean sugar plantations.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading this rich and magical book after many years. It is full of sounds, colours and smells; it introduces us to a pre-invasion Caribbean where life was orderly and structured; it weaves together history, mythology, Shakespeare, and an analysis of modern Britain in which people's lives are hemmed in by strange rituals and attitudes. Time in this novel is not lineal, people live in different worlds at the same time. Marina Warner's academic work can be fierce and difficult to access; this is the opposite.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a great deal, although the last third drags a bit. Both timelines were filled with fascinating characters and events. The book takes Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a kind of model, so it helps if you’re familiar with that text. Warner’s non-fiction books sound fascinating, and I intend to check them out as soon as time permits: From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers and No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2
---

“You’ll find out, children, that in this world, people burn to have things they can’t have, and strange things at that.”

[Morag · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book disappointing as I progressed through it. The half which is about the mythical island and its early inhabitants was great, with some beautiful writing and vivid characters. The second half of the book has a cast of late twentieth century people who are all deeply annoying. I found myself unable to sympathise with any of these middle class twits who are all paranoid. I nearly gave up, but persevered to a sort of messy conclusion that felt unsatisfactory.

[Sophie (RedheadReading) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book more than I did! Maybe I read it at the wrong time? I feel the storyline following Miranda and Xanthe could have been cut down and tightened a bit. I did really like how the 1600s storyline gave a voice to Sycorax and fleshed her out as a person, rather than a mystical idea. On the whole, I am left with mixed feelings and am a little sad about that!

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the writing and the ideas. I just found that it was too much of a broad overview of generations. The links of colonialism were important and well portrayed but I almost wanted it to be split into several books. In that respect it reminded me of Margaret Atwell. I loved the colours and the references to the Tempest.

[Heather King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just read Atwood's Hagseed, I figured I'd check off the other Tempest redux on my shelves. Warner's novel is very, very different, and takes the colonial questions associated with modern readings of The Tempest as central to a multigenerational saga. The transitions are dreamlike - at times hard to follow - but create a tonal effect that recalls Ariel's enchantments.

[TheCrazyFanvergent · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75

A volte un po' si perdeva, ed era troppo denso in punti in cui si poteva anche evitare, però ha fatto il suo lavoro. Si sentiva che in parte era anche un modo per sentirsi "meglio" (sostanzialmente ha fatto un po' la paraculo), PERÒ lo ha fatto molto bene, ho ADORATO come sia riuscita a mischiare realtà e fantasia, finzione e Storia,