I’m starting to really love P. Djèlí Clark’s writing. This is the second book I’ve read by him, and I liked it even more than Ring Shout, which is surprising because it’s rare for me to give a novella more than 4 stars (4.25 for this one). Often I find that characters don’t end up getting fleshed out enough for me, and while I would have loved more of The Black God’s Drums, Clark did a remarkable job considering the limited space he was working with.
The book is set in an alternate history version of New Orleans. It’s the 1880s and the Civil War never officially ended; instead there’s an armistice between North and South, the South still practices slavery, and New Orleans is a free city. 13-year-old orphan Creeper gets by through pickpocketing. When she overhears valuable information, she decides to sell it to a smuggler captain in exchange for getting out of New Orleans and seeing the world.
As with Ring Shout, Clark uses a lot of dialect (Creole, Caribbean) in his dialogue, and I loved how I could really hear it in my head. The cultural inclusion in general is a strong selling point for this book, including both Black Southern culture and African gods. And because there were fewer significant characters in this one, I felt like I got to know Creeper better than the characters in Ring Shout. I also think Clark writes women and girls really well, with no indication of a male gaze, and I love his inclusion of sexual diversity.
This was a really excellent novella. While I don’t know if I’m quite ready to make Clark an auto-buy author, I’m definitely inclined to move some of his other titles up higher on my TBR.
