House of Fossils

Following her amazing memoir" Unseen Worlds," Marilene Phipps offers us "House of Fossils," a poetic, genre-busting fictional memoir with the same high emotionality and vivid characterization that makes all her work so riveting. Io, is a form of the author's second soul, seeks beauty and timelessness in gestures, manner and thought, but finds herself caught in a world where human beings are held hostage to their racial origins, skin color, culture, and other people's reactions to these. She is an immigrant who aims to belong and develop an identity, freed from the kind of fossilization imposed on one's psyche by ancestry, family expectations and cultural norms. Her story weaves Haiti-its social idiosyncrasies built around color and class, its singular religious imagination combining Christianity and Vodou, its irruptive political history-with other areas of the US and of the world. The relevance of this book is clear in an America increasingly experiencing a multicultural evolution.