“Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s moving story about a Roma family working in the tobacco fields of southwestern Ontario during the 80s is a tour de force. Matriarch Rhodie and her sisters and daughter fight to preserve their culture while struggling with poverty, sub-par housing, cheating supervisors, accidents and more. The family’s struggles are interwoven with descriptions of nature—plants, birds and stars, crafted in a haunting poetic prose. Simultaneously prose poem and page-turner, Nightshade draws us into the lives of its characters. Readers will come to love fragile Liza-May, who tends to ill and injured birds, feisty Lilly, who stands up to injustice, and protagonist Zelda. Eighteen, Zelda longs for her own life and, like so many young women before her, makes both missteps and giant steps discovering what her own path might be. And the puppets! Grandmother puppet Puri Dai’s voice infuses the novel with a gentle wisdom, as she attempts to protect both her wooden and human charges.”—Ursula Pflug, author of Mountain
“Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s novel Nightshade gives a very rare and precious insight into a Romany family and community, their language and history; and I for one am so grateful it has been written. Reading the novel, the author’s words come from a wise and very old nomadic tradition. For many of us in the disconnected twenty-first century, it is time to speak about our hidden Romany identity and heritage. Today, it is about being a participant in a global story. Reading Nightshade, I felt like I was coming home.”—Frances Roberts Reilly, author of Parramisha: A Romani Poetry Collection