News & Features » March 2021 » CREATURES OF PASSAGE Receives High Praise in New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and more!
CREATURES OF PASSAGE Receives High Praise in New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and more!
Morowa Yejidé’s fantastic new novel, Creatures of Passage, has been getting lots of well-deserved attention:
“Creatures of Passage resists comparison. It’s reminiscent of Beloved as well as the Odyssey, but perhaps its most apt progenitor is the genre of epic poems performed by the djelis of West Africa . . . All these otherwise clashing elements become, in this cast, a cohesive whole, telling us that this, too, is America.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Yejidé’s writing captures both real news and spiritual truths with the deftness and capacious imagination of her writing foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin . . . Creatures of Passage is that rare novel that dispenses ancestral wisdom and literary virtuosity in equal measure.”
—Washington Post
“Mesmerizing . . . This contemporary fairy tale’s grandeur and psychedelic wonderment undergird a serious warning, urging readers to make sense of the story’s message of family, justice, trauma and healing and to find a way toward a saner future.”
—BookPage
One of BookMarks‘s Best Reviewed Books of the Week (Fiction)
“Morowa Yejidé’s Creatures of Passage gives readers a chance to experience grief and intergenerational trauma in a unique way.”
—The Root
“This enthralling, otherworldly story follows Nepthys Kinwell, a taxi drive in Washington, D.C., as she grapples with grief.”
—Woman’s World
“In its luminous prose, and its nods to mysticism and myth, the novel brings to mind the best of Toni Morrison. It’s that good.”
—Washington Post, One of the Best Books about Washington, DC, recommended by George Pelecanos
“Yejidé’s surreal new novel has no shortage of otherworldly surprises, but it’s her this-worldly protagonist who steals the show . . . Informed by a richly woven mythology and propelled by themes of regret and revenge, Creatures of Passage has earned some apt comparisons to Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer, One of the Best Books of Winter 2021
An Amazon.com Editors’ Pick, Best Science Fiction/Fantasy
“Hauntingly magical, this sophomore novel by Morowa Yejidé centers a young woman dealing with the loss of her brother, her young great-nephew who mysteriously shows up at her door and Washington, DC, the city that provides an otherworldly backdrop to this imaginative thriller.”
—Ms. Magazine, A Most Anticipated Book of 2021
“Comparisons to Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Beloved always perk up our ears, but in the case of Morowa Yejidé’s Creatures of Passage the hype is warranted . . . History-haunted in the best sense, readers shouldn’t miss this mythic thriller.”
—Chicago Review of Books, One of 12 Must-Read Books for March 2021
“A deeply layered novel of astonishing scope, suffused in the mythical, accented by the magical, but viscerally rooted in elemental human emotions. A deeply satisfying read.”
—Bloom
“A novel written by DC-raised Morowa Yejidé titled Creatures of Passage is a ghost story that also talks about the generational traumas experienced by Black Americans in DC.”
—Greater Greater Washington
“Unlike any book I’ve encountered before . . . Read this book.”
—A Girl Named Tommi
“A deeper, broader, and more audacious immersion in magical realism . . . Historic detail and mythic folklore forge a scary, thrilling vision of life along America’s margins.”
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED Review
“Skillfully blending fantasy and stark reality while blurring the line between the metaphoric and the tangible, Yejidé successfully tells the story in fits and starts as each major character adds a piece to the puzzle . . . Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal, STARRED Review
“Yejidé creates a tapestry of interconnected stories of guilt, loss, love, grief, justice, and restoration . . . Yejidé’s prose is often stunning . . . The story’s rich texture evokes the ghost stories of Toni Morrison.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fatal racism, police violence, pedophilia, family dysfunction—all the horrific ills of contemporary society wreak destruction, but somehow humanity survives.”
—Booklist
“In this beautifully written and gloriously conceived novel, Morowa Yejidé reveals her mastery yet again. This book is both contemporary and ancient, frightening and stirring, playful and wise, an unforgettable blurring of reality and genres from its haunted Plymouth automobile to the mysteries in the fog in this alternate America and hidden Washington, DC. With its lyricism and bold imagination, Creatures of Passage is unlike anything you’ve ever read.”
—Tananarive Due, author of Ghost Summer: Stories
“Comparisons will be made to Toni Morrison and they will be well-founded, but Morowa Yejidé is in a class of her own with Creatures of Passage, a mesmerizing tale about love, loss, revenge, death, and restoration that hovers close to the edge of fantasy yet is deeply grounded in history and in a reality easily recognizable in the contemporary world.”
—Elizabeth Nunez, author of Even in Paradise
“Although set in our recent past, Creatures of Passage is at heart a powerful ghost story about people haunted by the shadows of time and the shadows of blood. In the pages of this novel we discover a world that is fully recognizable, as concrete and real as Toni Morrison’s Ohio, but also as fantastic and mythical as Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo. That said, make no mistake: Morowa Yejidé is a masterful storyteller in her own right, able to spin and sustain an inventive tale illuminated by a singular truth, that death is ‘another form of living.’”
—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank
Posted: Mar 25, 2021
Category: News | Tags: Akashic Books, Booklist, BookPage, Chicago Review of Books, Creatures of Passage, Elizabeth Nunez, Jeffery Renard Allen, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Morowa Yejidé, Ms. Magazine, New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Publishers Weekly, Tananarive Due, Washington Post