Redemption in Indigo recalls oral storytelling culture implicitly throughout and explicitly at the close, the narrator in active conversation with the audience there are asides in response to implied audience questions and reactions, comments on the narrative unlike what we see in most nominally-narratorless third person viewpoint works, lengthy asides to the reader than can be totally tangential to the plot but integral to the story. That active narratorial voice, so familiar to readers of Valente’s Fairyland books, is one of the biggest pleasures of the book. So let’s just call it fantasy and be done with trying to categorise the novel, as I’m sure the narrator would recommend… Lord’s debut novel is that strange beast, straddling different lines Redemption in Indigo has aspects of urban fantasy (modern setting, for instance), of myth, of magical realism (including the limitation of subtlety on the supernatural actors in the novel). The narrator, sometimes serious and often mischievous, spins delicate but powerful descriptions of locations, emotions, and the protagonists’ great flaws and great strengths as they interact with family, poets, tricksters, sufferers of tragedy, and – of course – occasional moments of pure chaos.

Now he wants it back, and he has all sorts of elaborate schemes planned to induce Paama to give him back the Chaos Stick. The Indigo Lord once wielded the power of Chaos, imbued within the Chaos Stick, but to punish him it was taken from him and given to Paama. These events draw the attention of Chance, the Indigo Lord, one of the powerful spirits called Djombi. Kwame needs the money to finance his own wanderlust and reluctantly takes the job. Paama, who is a great cook, has returned to her family after 10 years of marriage to the gluttonous Ansige, but two years later he hires the master tracker Kwame to find her.

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord