Colleen Mondor Reviews River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta

River Mumma, Zalika Reid-Benta (Penguin Canada 978-0-73524-476-4, C$24.95, 256pp, tp) August 2023. (Erewhon 978-1-645-66135-1, $27.00, 284pp, hc) March 2024. Cover by Rebecca Farrin.

So there you are, grad school completed, back home with degree in hand, and all your hopes and dreams must be shelved because the only job you can get entails a lot of folding clothes, cleaning up fitting rooms, and greeting bored customers. This is the reality for 26-year-old Alicia, who did not plan to leave New York, move back in with her mom in Toronto, have a soul-killing job, or spend her evenings reading about former classmates who, based on their so­cial media postings, all seem to be succeeding on an epic scale. Attending a party at a co-worker’s house is not on her To Do list either, but there’s a whole lot of nothing on that list, so, when Zalika Reid Benta’s debut novel River Mumma opens, that is where she is. Then Alicia gets a tarot card reading that freaks her out (note to the unaware: such readings at parties will always freak you out), and heads out for home only to encounter a very angry Jamaican deity, River Mumma, who demands that in the next twenty-four hours Alicia recover an item that was stolen from the deity back in Jamaica by a visiting Canadian tourist. Why River Mumma has chosen Alicia for this job, and how she is supposed to find the missing comb, is dreadfully unclear. Get the comb, get it back, or River Mumma will dry up every river everywhere. It’s the end of the world unless Alicia gets her act together very, very quickly. Based on Alicia’s less than impressive interest in anything other than her own internal drama, I was not hopeful this novel would have a happy ending for our hero. Of course I was wrong about that, but the jour­ney to get there makes for an exciting, and quite illuminating, reading experience.

First, spare a moment for poor Alicia. We have all been in her place where things are just not working out the way we want them to. Granted, most of us don’t end up talking to a mermaid (the mermaid!), then almost drowning while having a sudden vision of our ancestors. But we have all been disappointed and struggled to “just hang in there until things get better” when there is no sign, at all, that better is on the horizon. The sudden charge from River Mumma would be exactly the sort of adventure that Alicia could be expected to embrace, but the problem is, the visions begin to come at a furious clip and while they enlighten her as to her family’s Jamaican past, they are also intensely emotional and, in one horrific instance, terribly violent. The more immediate issue, however, is the duppies, frequently malevolent spirits (in this case definitely malevolent), who are determined to stop her from finding the comb. There are many ways in which the duppies can kill, maim, or infect their victims, and at one point or another Alicia comes close to experiencing all of them. To survive all this, and be successful for River Mumma, she finds herself relying on two co-workers who have their own connections to Jamaica. While she tries to hold herself apart, insisting they are not friends, Heaven and Marcus easily prove that all of Alicia’s tough exterior, built to endure her professional disappointments, has been for naught. They are actually the best sort of friends, the kind who never turn their backs on you or give up, even when the tourist lady ends up being only part of the missing comb puzzle. (That lady – ugh!)

River Mumma would be an excellent read if it was just a “run around Toronto to find the miss­ing treasure, satisfy the deity, educate the folks on why stealing from a deity is a problem and avoid the duppies” kind of book. But Reid-Benta has a coming-of-age story built into her narrative, a wise and surprising message about deadlines and success that hits home not only for Alicia but for the reader as well. Her deft character development and thoughtful threading of Jamaican history into the plot make for a novel that resonates on many levels and should certainly succeed with readers.

Every time I read a haunted house story, part of my brain is tracking just how many things need to go wrong before the folks in the house finally admit that things are spiraling out of control. To be honest, this is part of the appeal of such novels and can often be a bigger part of the story than the haunting itself. (I will digress here for a moment to share that my family lived in a haunted house when I was very young, and it got so bad that my mother hung crucifixes over both my bed and my brother’s, but my parents still did not move. My mother acknowledges now that it makes no sense they stayed but says the real estate market was tricky and they had no choice.)

This review and more like it in the May 2024 issue of Locus.

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