Surrounding Gayl Jones is an aura of violet light ... Palmares is an odyssey, one woman’s search first for a place, and then for a person ... Jones writes in ancestral tongues, shifting between languages, going from dialogue to dream-speak, fever to prophesy, sometimes midsentence ... This book takes patience. Time sometimes stretches, sometimes collapses in on itself ... Jones’s writing is most potent when it blends the ethereal and the corporeal, as if it comes from some celestial place ... Her oracular integrity comes into question, however, when she introduces characters who are lesbian or gender nonconforming. ... What can explain these scenes? They are filtered through Almeyda’s eyes, and we learn early on that on the plantation, Almeyda has been raised Catholic, presumably to believe homosexuality is a sin ... Mercy, this story shimmers. Shakes. Wails. Moves to rhythms long forgotten. Chants in incantations highly forbidden. It is a story woven with extraordinary complexity, depth and skill; in many ways: holy ... The story ends not exactly in medias res, but on a beat that begs continuation. This feeling of masterpiece-in-and-as-process is deliberate, and genius.

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.

The marvellous thing about the new novel, Palmares, is that Jones here allows women to get close without trying to destroy one another. Those feelings, however, still emerge under the dreadful cloud of oppression ... the women of color in Palmares have so little that they can share with their casual or brutal assaulters—to talk back is to court death. But Almeyda has the language of her mind, which is filled with fascinating observations ... The connection between Luiza and Almeyda feels forced at times—Jones’s attempts at magical realism in Palmares are more dispiriting than they are transporting—and one’s patience wears thin with the introduction of yet another significant character, especially one who embodies the virtues of silent womanhood and maintains a knowing, almost supernatural distance. Editing is a delicate process, and part of the job entails listening for what the author cannot hear. Reading Palmares, I thought of Toni Morrison, the editor who helped Jones become an author. Morrison often read with a pencil in hand; in the margins of this book, she might have jotted, 'I hear you, but it’s missing something. How about a bit more life?'

... that rare thing, a life’s work ... It is the first half that is the most clear and accessible, and which affords far more of the traditional pleasures of historical fiction ... Ms. Jones has always sought to imbue her writing with musicality, and if previous first-person voices drew upon blues singing and jazz riffs, Almeyda’s reminiscences are mellifluous and subdued, almost murmured, holding the reader’s attention not through emphasis but a kind of determined incantatory rhythm. There are no dramatic rises and falls here, only the solemn aggregation of events, as of knowledge, and this is most conspicuous in Ms. Jones’s choice to elide the destruction of Palmares entirely, explaining it only after a leap ahead in time to when Almeyda is wounded and alone ... the novel’s momentum grinds pretty much to a halt. There is a sense that each discrete episode, clearly the product of years of contemplation, is intended to be read and studied independently rather than experienced within the flow of a narrative. Palmares comes to resemble a kind of wisdom book, trading away plot for parables ... Might that account for its abrupt, exhausted and completely anticlimactic ending? One puts down Palmares with a feeling that this book is not just unfinished (and Ms. Jones has written poems imagining Almeyda’s children, so perhaps there is more story to come) but unfinishable, one of those works whose questions and mysteries will be occupying its creator until the end of her life. Whether one is drawn to or warned away by the book’s challenges, this much is certain: It is unlike anything else that will be published this year.

Jones makes a strong return with a mesmerizing epic of late-17th-century Brazil ... Jones’ storytelling exerts a powerful pull, and readers will achieve complete immersion in a setting in which African and Indigenous cultures are memorably delineated. Through richly woven prose, Almeyda’s journey compels reflection on how freedom must always be defended and how women bear extra societal burdens. Mystical sequences give the plot additional depth and texture. While drawn-out in parts, Jones’ novel is a superb reclamation of the historical novel.

Palmares is busy with visitors; a painter, a lexicographer, a journalist, witches, medicine women, free men, disfigured women. At times, the conveyor belt of new characters is disorienting, while the dialogue can be repetitive ... But it’s a small price to pay for a book that’s full of imagination and visionary thinking. After a two-decade absence, Jones is back with a formidable novel steeped in history, magical realism, trauma and triumph.

An epic adventure of enchantment, enslavement, and the pursuit of knowledge in 17th-century Brazil ... As with the most ambitious and haunting of magical realist sagas, Jones’ novel recounts detail after detail with such fluidity that the reader is aware of time’s passage without knowing how many years have gone by ... There is also sheer wonder, insightful compassion, and droll wit to be found among the book’s riches. Jones seems to have come through a life as tumultuous as her heroine’s with her storytelling gifts not only intact, but enhanced and enriching. It is marvelous, in every sense, to have a new Gayl Jones novel to talk about.

An epic and inventive saga that weaves together magic, mythology, and Portuguese colonial history ... The magical elements are difficult to get an initial purchase on, as they aren’t given much explanation, but Jones brings her established incisiveness and linguistic flair to the horrifyingly accurate portrayal of racial struggle. All in all, it’s a triumphant return.