★★★☆☆ Horrible people on the Gullah Geechee Islands

The Last Dreamwalker

Rita Woods

There is a literary genre I call "Horrible people being horrible". It is not one of my favorites. It is rather surprising how much of literature (and also film and television) can be thus described. The Last Dreamwalker is not clearly an example of this genre. There are flashes of light -- of kind people being kind to each other. But there is no doubt that much of the book, including most of the plot, is about horrible people being horrible to each other.

In fact, the book is centered on an entire family of horrible women who are magically horrible to each other and to other people over the course of some 200 years. It begins with an African woman named Nola who is brought to South Carolina as a slave. Nola is a Dreamwalker -- read the book to find out what that entails. Dreamwalking is a gift she passes on to her daughters. Eventually it comes to Layla Hurley, who is the present-day protagonist of the novel, and is the last Dreamwalker. (Or at least the latest -- the possibility is left open that Layla will herself eventually have daughters.) We also spend quite a lot of time with Layla's Dreamwalker ancestors, in particular with one Gemma, a slave at the time of the Civil War.

Much of the story takes place in coastal South Carolina, and in particular on one of the Gullah-Geechee Islands, Scotia Island. The Gullah-Geechee Islands are real -- Scotia Island, as far as I've been able to determine, is fictional. It felt real, however. That sense of place, of a real place and culture where the story was grounded and where Layla's Dreamwalker family originated, is what rescues the book.

This was, to be honest, a book I was glad to reach the end of.

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