Moon Witch, Spider King

Another powerful and visceral depiction of African fantasy from Marlon James. I listened to the audio book with a very strong performance by Bahni Turpin who does a stupendous job of bringing Sogolon to life. In this story we follow the life story of Sogolon (the Moon Witch in [b:Black Leopard, Red Wolf 50608676 Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1) Marlon James https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1579618622l/50608676.SX50.jpg 48215793]) and here ongoing struggle with the Aesi (one half of the Spider King). While technically a sequel to [b:Black Leopard, Red Wolf 50608676 Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1) Marlon James https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1579618622l/50608676.SX50.jpg 48215793] the book goes back further in time and neatly swallows it whole. The change in point of view from a gay man to a woman dramatically changes the context of the book and the themes the book explores . Moon Witch's story is the struggle for self determination and the freedom to make her own decisions and the slow realisation of her power and agency. She is a power and often unlikeable character. I enjoyed the book in spite of its profanity and challenging scenes. There are a lot of situations that are hard to read (sexual and non-sexual violence and coercion, slavery). The story does a good job of dealing with difficult topics without being exploitative (in my opinion).

Complicated and dense, more so than BLRW. I get why it was written in a dialect (of sorts?), but it was distracting. But, I couldn't put it down.

The story seems very interesting, but the writing style, with the different gammer and sentence structure, made it difficult for me to focus on the book and really enjoy it. Perhaps I'll pick it up at a later date, but not sure