Strange Horizons, October 15, 2018

“De Mother Jumpers” by Celeste Rita Baker

Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf

The characters in “De Mother Jumpers” by Celeste Rita Baker are aquatic humans. They are the descendants of captives who escaped from slave ships and survived in the sea. The narrator, in search of a new home, leads a group of her people to an island reef. The excursion ends in tragedy. Others blame her for the deaths of her companions, and she pays a terrible price.

This is an imaginative story, with vivid scenes of underwater life. It carries a powerful emotional impact, which some may find disturbing. Given the length of this novelette, as well as its long sentences and paragraphs, many readers are likely to find the narrator’s heavy dialect difficult to read.

Victoria Silverwolf has been binge-watching Quantum Leap lately.