RaveThe Guardian (UK)Almeyda’s journeys to and from Palmares are winding and wild, and so is Jones’s writing ... If you try to read the book over a weekend, you may find yourself overwhelmed. Palmares is a grand epic, in the west African and Afro-Brazilian oral traditions, to be savoured in parts, night after night ... Jones doesn’t romanticise Palmares, which had a governance structure based on that of contemporary west African states ... Palmares takes us to a key moment in the invention of race and gender. Almeyda repeatedly asks what a \'woman\' is, revealing, through her encounters, the influence of unstable constructs such as race. Jones’s narration is similarly fluid, moving with beauty and abundance between meticulous documentation and surrealism, singing with Portuguese and Indigenous words and phrases ... reinvents 17th-century Black Brazil in all its multiplicity, beauty, humanity and chaos. It is a once-in-a-lifetime work of literature, the kind that changes your understanding of the world.
