How rare to encounter a dauntless and complex novel that convincingly melds true history with magic, but Tiphanie Yanique’s debut—a rich seascape about family and legacy, beauty’s clout and the variable waves of race and class on the twentieth-century Caribbean islands—accomplishes just that ... So much happens in the midsized novel’s pages, yet Yanique’s authorial power never wavers; whether depicting incest in the Bradshaw family or the mythic outcome of that indiscretion, she renders each scene in sharp details that transcend culture, that travel across oceans.

Yanique has set out to write the epic of this region and culture, and in fact this book deserves better than to be labeled with last-century publishing buzzwords ... Here is the stuff of legend, tremendously amplified by the oral history culture of the islands. Magical realism might better have been called legendary realism from the start. Caribbean novelists have not much deployed it (they have their own variations on obeah to work with), but Yanique has helped herself to Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s toolbox ... Yanique has borrowed a few pieces of furniture from the Southern Gothic attic. In place of Faulkner’s preoccupation with miscegenation (sheer nonsense in Yanique’s fictional world), there is incest, a recurring motif among the Bradshaws ... This novel builds its best effects rather slowly, but in the end Yanique succeeds in evoking the panorama of the Virgin Islands in a voice all her own.

While the novel is a sweeping, historical family epic with touches of magical realism, immediately putting it in a similar vein to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude or Toni Morrison’s Song Of Solomon or Isabel Allende’s The House Of The Spirits, such comparisons may also be doing a disservice. Yanique’s voice is her own ... Despite having several narrators telling many sides of the same story, this is essentially the tale of two sisters, Eeona and Anette—the bonds holding them together and the differences, the secrets, that threaten to fracture them irreparably and even eradicate the enduring legacy of their family. It’s a tale about how they awaken and adjust to their father’s harmful choices, how modernization and politics eventually find their way to what seemed to be an idyllic island existence. Yanique’s novel is a vivid, shimmering, lyrical portrait, a love letter to these islands and to the hypnotic, dangerous power of the sea.

...a brave, passionate saga of three generations ... A fable's tone saturates the narrative ... Narrating in a beguiling, musical patois, Anette's is the novel's most delicious voice and energy, its spokesperson. It's Anette we most care and cheer for ... Told from alternating points of view (including a we who represent an anonymous chorus of 'old wives,' the narrative takes sassy liberties with time and voice, calmly folding in the occasional riffle of magic ... This sensuous, queasy, dream-sequence uncertainty, the casual allusions to obeah (witchcraft) and to eerie island folktales, sets up a kind of contrapuntal tension against the grimly real history (including the Second World War and Korean War) surging alongside - compounded, too, by the steady, ugly incursions on island life by American culture and tourism ... One wishes, wistfully, that there had been a magic strong enough to ward off colonizers.

We do hear Anette, loud and clear. She narrates some of the novel’s best passages in a dialect that is both inventive and fluid ... I wish Yanique had written more of the novel in that voice. Instead, she jumps erratically from one character’s mind to the next, in a way that can feel unbalanced. Perhaps that was her aim. Yanique makes it clear from the beginning that she is not interested in the framing and cornicing of realism ... Yanique, meanwhile, brings the natural world of the Virgin Islands into high relief, with similes that seem to erupt effortlessly from the lushness of her prose ... Yanique brings reams of this spoken lore to the page.

Her prose combines a touch of Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner transported to the Caribbean, and Zadie Smith’s grasp on a place’s dialect and ability ... It’s told through the shifting points of view of multiple narrators (the voices of the two sisters, Anette and Eeonna, are the strongest), but the novel finds its strongest character in mysterious, chaotic St. Thomas itself. The unsettling feeling that hangs around the island seems just as palpable as the ocean breeze ... Ultimately, this vibrant novel is about the sins of the father haunting his children long after he’s gone. It’s a story of family and of place, but Yanique writes so clearly, and wastes little time setting the scene for the reader, that it’s impossible not to get wrapped up in either of those things ... If there’s a better book to read over the summer than this one, please let me know where you find it.

Some of the most gorgeous, affecting scenes, the most unique uses of language are in early family scenes involving Owen, Antoinette, and Eeona, with interludes of backstory provided by Anette who is as-yet unborn. Yanique tends to unfold a scene completely and bravely, and then sum it all up with an unforgettable aphorism ... The dichotomy of the cool-headed sister and the warmly passionate sister strongly reminded me of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (there are a number of plot elements that reminded me of British 19th century novels, including those by the Bronte sisters, in spite of the magical elements), but with very different conclusions drawn and a generous openness that runs counter to Austen's narrowed, careful focus ... The novel sags at various points in the second half and its pacing suffers occasionally from its own gregarious, feeling impulse and its perspectival jumps ... Yanique has a distinct, arresting way of casting a spell and prodigious storytelling talents that allow us to absorb her sensuous blend of history and myth without any doubt that it all happened. This book's sustained and rhythmic evocation of time and place is spectacular, and it seems likely to become a classic of Caribbean American literature to which readers will want to return again and again.

The ocean laps through Yanique’s intergenerational epic, infusing it with a sense of magic only compounded by the magical realism elements. The story — roughly based on Yanique’s own family’s history — unfolds on breezy beaches, during salty night swims, and in seaside towns over the course of three twisted, troubled generations ... Anette and Eona’s voices vibrate with humanity, allowing the reader to slip easily into their different but deeply intertwined consciousnesses. But the omniscient narration sometimes feels more like a stopgap, with uneven prose and occasionally forceful theme explication. Though Yanique often successfully evokes the blue-green clarity of the sea in her luminous, sun-dappled prose, at other times she seems to be striving too hard to evoke it ... Though rough at points, Yanique’s debut novel bursts with imagination and intoxicating atmosphere, and the deeply felt characters at its heart demand to be heard.

Alternately told in neat, concise speech and fiery Caribbean dialect, Land of Love and Drowning is well researched—much of Yanique’s family history is woven into the storyline—and the novel’s careful structure keeps the reader from getting lost amid the historical context. Yanique’s vivid writing, echoing Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez, builds a whole world within its language and cadence. Exhilarating, fierce and effortless, Land of Love and Drowning is the imaginative tale of a family’s fight to endure.

...you'll find that Land of Love and Drowning goes down easy but offers only the lightest buzz, like a rum-and-coke that's been left in the sun a little too long. The fictional tale, into which Yanique has interwoven bits of her own family history and folktales, follows three generations of the Bradshaw family on the island of St. Thomas ... As in much magical realism, fate trumps psychology, and characters don't change so much as play their inborn tunes over and over, with slight variations according to circumstance ... There's a pleasing cacophony to letting the voices jostle up against one another this way, but it's hard to tell what motivates the narrative switching, and Yanique rarely explores either the resonances between them or their differences ... If anything, the book doesn't go far enough in its risk-taking, as the conventional third-person narrative dominates.

The novel shows how global conflicts, including World War II, and America’s legacy of racism shape the lives of Jacob and other islanders ... Amid the devastation of hurricanes and exploitation by wealthy American entrepreneurs, the sisters struggle to understand their history, their place in the modern world, and the fatal attraction of the islands’ magical beauty. Through the voices and lives of its native people, Yanique offers an affecting narrative of the Virgin Islands that pulses with life, vitality, and a haunting evocation of place.

In alternating short chapters, we hear from a wise, playful third-person narrator and, in first person, from each of Bradshaws' three outlandishly beautiful children ... Their story is interwoven with both the folklore and history of the island: backward-facing feet, silver pubic hair and a race of demigods called the Duene are sprinkled among scenes of development, hurricanes, tourism and the social movements of the 1960s and '70s ... Bubbling with talent and ambition, this novel is a head-spinning Caribbean cocktail.