Emmelie Prophète’s Blue is a complex and reflective read.

We follow the narrator’s thoughts as she reflects while waiting at an airport. The story flows gently, as if we are truly hearing the narrator’s inner monologue. Long sentences that are bursting with information and detail give the reader a huge amount of detail. And, like listening to someone else’s train of thought, it can be a little confusing at times. This short story makes you think and work a bit, as the reader, to fully follow the story but the mood created by the author can be felt through the writing.

I don’t understand French, so cannot compare with the original, however, I think Tina Kover’s translation has done justice to Prophète’s work. The words are full of emotion and memory and the reader really can feel the narrator through this book.

Unfortunately Blue was a book that just didn't work for me. I was unable to connect emotionally with the narrator and even though it is a very short book, I still skimmed over sections. I do enjoy a literary read but I felt I was ill-equipped to really grasp the author's words. The imagery is very vivid and life for the narrator and the generations that preceded her are well depicted but in this case, I'm afraid, I was just the wrong reader for the book.

A beautiful thoughtful lyrical novel.An airport setting a woman waiting for her flight home.The color blue vibrates with life and so does this short but powerful read..

Emmelie Prophete has created a magical and stunning tale with Blue. Full of color, life and beauty; it is easy to get swept away by the words and images that fill this story.

At a mere 126 pages Blue is part lyrical stream of consciousness, part ode to the narrator’s motherland and generations of women. Their stories are told to us while she travels from Miami back to her hometown, Port-au-Prince, Haiti and finds herself waiting at the airport.

Full review: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/blue-emmelie-prophete/

A lyrical and poetic memoir of Haiti. As the narrator sits at the airport waiting for a flight from Miami back to her native island, she reminisces about her life there and in particular about the lives of her mother and two aunts, whose miserable lives under the domination of worthless men, caught in an existence of poverty, loss and grief, are painful indeed. It’s a meandering and reflective narrative, as much an extended prose poem as anything, and at times I found its discursiveness hard to follow. The stream of consciousness style doesn’t lend itself to easy reading, and although I’m willing to put in a certain amount of effort in my reading, the pay-off has to be than I got from this, thankfully, short book. One I appreciated rather than enjoyed, although the descriptions of life in Haiti are indeed vivid and atmospheric.

“I am a witness to the slow death of my land, to its inexorable slide toward a foreign elsewhere, toward the sea, toward abysses near and far.”

Blue is very much my kind of book. I’ve always held a sort of romantic or hopeful view of airports, so a book about a Haitian woman’s airport reflections on what it means to leave and what it means to return to a homeland are really powerful.

Prophète’s writing is clear and beautiful. The brief meditations kept the pacing up while letting her poetic language shine.

I enjoyed this book and if you enjoy character-forward novels that talk about place, belonging, family, loss, love, and what it means to be a person, you’ll like this one too.

Thank you to AmazonCrossing publishing and NetGalley for a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All views expressed here are mine.

Blue is a beautiful novel; but it's one of those books the requires a little work from readers. Our narrator is sitting in Miami airport, drinking coffee and waiting for a flight home to Haiti after having attended an aunt's funeral. The novel is comprised of her inner ramblings: family stories, reflections on the choices of her aunts, reflections on her own choices. Since her thoughts move back and forth in time and she is thinking about people she knows well, readers must assemble the chronology and work out the relationships among individuals for themselves. While readers have to work a bit, the reading experience itself is lovely. The language is poetic in a way that enhances meaning, rather than obscuring it. This is a book for readers to pick up when they're feeling a bit ruminative and are open to entering another's inner world. The payoff is excellent.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are mown.

3 stars *may change

I think I’m someone who enjoys poetry on a one-on-one basis. Like, I’ll have one short poem I really enjoy, but if you give me an entire narrative book written in poetry form it’ll be too much for me? I just don’t click with it. Especially since this is a translated work, so it loses a lot of its original beauty and intent. Arghhh


Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

This was a beautiful work of prose poetry with a really strong atmosphere. Unfortunately, the narrative just didn't connect with me. Probably just "wrong time, wrong reader."