The parallel narrative told in standard English concerns the coming-of-age of Tan-Tan, who as a young girl pretends to be the Robber Queen and later acts out the role as a means of surviving a harsh exile, thus providing the basis of the Midnight Robber legend the other narrator is relating. While this kind of thing -- telling the "actual" story that mirrors the myth -- has been done before, Hopkinson puts a very nice original spin on it.

At the risk of comparing authors based on ethnic origins, which can admittedly be simplistic, I couldn't help but be reminded of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which is also grounded in black vernacular. Though it won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award, the novel was subject to several criticisms, one politically correct and the other literary. Walker's depiction of black men as sexual predators was faulted by some as reinforcing white racist stereotypes; a more legitimate complaint, in my view, was that her "feel-good" ending trivialized the black experience. Of course, this complaint is all the more ironical considering that the charge is leveled at a black author.

Hopkinson is open to similar criticisms, although she's less guilty of a "happy-ever-after" ending in Midnight Robber. Actually, I think Midnight Robber is a more sophisticated work than Walker's, but don't hold your breath waiting for the Pulitzer nominations or, for that matter, Oprah Winfrey selecting it for her book club because -- you guessed it -- Hopkinson writes SF. Which is actually a good thing, because it gives Hopkinson the freedom to continue working unfettered in a genre that at its best remains subversive because the mainstream doesn't pay much attention to it. That may not be a good thing in terms of royalty checks, but in the long run it might be the best thing for Hopkinson's art.

As it happens, Hopkinson has garnered her share of awards in her field -- Brown Girl in the Ring earned the Locus Award for Best First Novel and the John W. Campbell Award for best new SF Writer; it was also a Philip K. Dick finalist. The publication of the novel itself was an award, a winning entry out of 1,000 submitted for the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. I don't want to detract in any way from these accolades or the author's abilities, but Hopkinson stands out in large part because of her ethnicity in a field largely dominated by a white middle-class readership and authorship. (Quick, name a black SF writer other than Octavia Butler or Samuel Delaney.) Which is odd, if you think about it. Shouldn't minorities be attracted to a genre that deals in themes of alienation (a reason why fantasy is thought to be particularly intriguing to adolescents, particularly those with homosexual tendencies)? Hopkinson herself, -- born in Jamaica, raised in Guyana and Trinidad before moving to Canada at the age of 16 -- has said that her use of Afro-American themes and idioms in speculative fiction stems from an attempt at:

"...subverting the genre, which speaks so much about the experience of being alienated, but contains so little written by alienated people themselves."

I'd recommend Midnight Robber as a much more sophisticated work than her debut novel (contradicting usual notions of sophomore jinx) and even if I wouldn't necessarily put either book on an essential reading list, I look forward to following this author's career. It sort of reminds me when I was kid and being told to read authors that I didn't really get at the time, like Phil Dick or Roger Zelazny, but being excited about the sense that there was something really cool going on that I shouldn't miss.