Nalo Hopkinson

Come in peace to my home, Tan-Tan. And when you go, go in friendship.

She was hiding in the best possible way, masquerading as herself!

Suck all the juice this life will give! (p33)

She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food.

She had a yearning to lose herself in this noisy throng of people going about the business of staying alive.

Just being Tan-Tan, sometimes good, sometimes bad, mostly just getting by like everybody else.

“I can’t keep giving my will into other people hands no more, ain’t? I have to decide what I want to do for myself.” No answer. It wasn’t going to tell her.

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time. (p179)

This was a thing she’d not seen before, how the meat that fed her was a living being one minute and then violently dead. The smell of it was personal, inescapable, like the scent that rose in the steam from her own self when she stepped into a hot bath. They had broken open the animal’s secret body just to eat it.

Since Baby’s birth, she had learned that the first few months of motherhood were about fatigue and leakiness.