April 17, 2023
Brazilian writer Vieira Júnior’s alluring English-language debut traces the lives of twin sisters in rural Brazil after a catastrophic accident. Belonísia and Bibiana, five years old, discover an ivory-handled knife hidden by their grandmother. They each put the knife in their mouths, then fight over it, and one of them loses a tongue (it’s not immediately clear which of them it is). In the first part, Bibiana chronicles the farm labor, religious practices, and struggles of their family and neighbors in Água Negra, their remote community of Black subsistence farmers, and offers impressionistic views of the girls’ healer father: “He’d speak differently, he’d sing and whirl with wonderful agility around the room, endowed with the powers of the spirits of the forest, the waters, the mountains, the air.” The second part, narrated by Belonísia, picks up with the twins as young adults, revealing the limited choices they have for marriage and the dignity they scrape together. In the third act, a folkloric spirit named Santa Rita the Fisherwoman joins the twins to share secrets of their grandmother’s past involving the hidden knife. Vieira Júnior conveys the girls’ childhood confusion and wonder in hypnotic prose, and he brings the close-knit Água Negra to life. This heralds the arrival of a welcome voice.

Starred review from June 1, 2023
The moving story of a family in rural Brazil. This novel begins tightly focused on a family unit and gradually expands its scope to take on broader questions of race and class. Each of its three parts has a different narrator, with sisters Bibiana and Belon�sia handling the first two. Bibiana is older by a year, and when the two are 7 and 6, curiosity leads them to taste the blade of a knife--at which point Belon�sia winds up losing most of her tongue. From then on, Bibiana describes the sisters as "sharing the same tongue to make the words that revealed what we needed to become." Eventually, Bibiana gets pregnant and leaves home; not long after, her sister becomes the focus of the narrative. Belon�sia's husband, Tobias, has a penchant for drunken behavior, which ends badly for him. "My mother's happy marriage, or my sister's--these seemed the exceptions," Belon�sia notes. Gradually, the challenges faced by the sisters' family as they work as farmers come more into focus, leaving them at the mercy of the elements: "The drought had just ended, now we'd suffer the ruin of the flood." The novel's third section is narrated by a kind of bodiless saint, Santa Rita the Fisherwoman--which in practice amounts to mostly omniscient narration with a few choice asides: "My horse has died, so I cannot go forth mounted as I should, the way an encantada should present herself to human beings, the way she should reveal herself in this world​​." The plantation where the sisters work changes hands, and Bibiana ponders taking on a leadership role in the community much like her late husband. Among the laudable feats Vieira Junior accomplishes in this novel is the way it gradually moves from a highly specific story to one with implications for a region's entire working class. In a book that often concerns itself with voices both singular and collective, it's a stirring progression. This is a stirring, lived-in novel of struggles both personal and societal.

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