“What a marvel. In Nightshade, Lynn Hutchinson Lee conjures a world of heat-hazed fields and white gardens where glamour beckons and danger moves just out of sight. Zelda’s desire to be seen—by wealth, by power—meets the fierce love and warning of Romany women who know the cost. The prose is sensuous and exact, the folklore alive, the politics unflinching. This is a novel about work and hunger, inheritance and passing, and the thin veil between rescue and trap. I’ll be pressing it into many hands.”—Oksana Marafioti, author of American Gypsy: A Memoir
“Lee has created a gorgeous, swirling story about family and heritage and temptation in this novel. Centering on a Romani family working on a tobacco farm in the early 1980s, we become particularly close to Zelda, who is desperate for the ease and opportunity that she thinks will come when she leaves her family and seeks a life elsewhere. Puri Dai dances in and out of the story, having vivid dreams and sharing knowledge and warnings that will hopefully keep Zelda and the family safe. An interesting read about Romani heritage, thankfully written by a gifted author of Romani descent.”—Manda Barker, Raven Book Store
“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