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#booker #IB2025 12 of 13. I have one left.

This is a novel about the life of descendants of African slavery on Reunion Island - a French territory in the Indian Ocean. Despite some humor and charm, don‘t expect to be uplifted.

“For here, their pain is told, their disgrace blessed. By night, as by day, I wanted them to exist here, to have an ode to their madness, a book that avenges them even as it absolves them."

So when nothing's going right, when the walls get so high that even prayers can't help you scale them, I open a comic book. As if leaning over a precipice, I dive right in, seeking a different world where no one can find me and I can forget. I have a book on my bedside table. Because I don't have a gun.

And a train behind the book...

From then on, I demanded that the Dessaintes call me Ratus, much to their dismay! And I began to regularly commit a crime that neither of them would have dreamt of: I read! Worse still, I enjoyed it! Thoroughly. So thoroughly that I worked out how to beat those scoundrels: I would read, and invent stories, and make my own books. I would rise above my station and go places people couldn't imagine me in.

Only after dinner would their father loosen up.... he would describe to the eight children sitting before him the monsters whose shadows he glimpsed when he went to the fields at four in the morning - hanged monsters with swollen tongues, giant highway-bandits, creatures who were half woman, half fish. This was the children's favourite time, these stories told by the light of a kerosene lamp, the huge centipedes chasing around the wooden benches.

I‘m not sure what I feel about this novel, but maybe a soft pick, guess only time will tell.

A story about a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family and where her parents mantra is “That‘s the way it is and that‘s that!â€�

Another book of the #InternationalBooker Longlist

Thanks for the quiz link @BarbaraBB . Off to find a copy.

See her original post to see which you should read.