Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930)

An Edwardian-era mash-up of an Anne Rice-esque Gothic melodrama and an emphatically hotep Wakanda. Can I say that this is a good book? No. No, I cannot. I can't even say that it's coherent. It's a queasy mix of some accurate social/historical observations with an awful lot of colourism and misogyny. And then there's all the double bigamous incest? (Incestuous bigamy?)

But I can say that I never could predict what Pauline Hopkins was going to throw at the reader next. Which I guess is something.

It's not the weirdest book I've read, but it's close. Reuel Briggs is a mixed-race medical student and scientist passing for white who falls in love with a black singer, who dies. Through his understanding of early-20th-century pseudopsychology, he's able to revive her, but she's lost her memory. So he tells her she's white and they get married. Unable to find a job in the United States, he goes to Africa as the medical advisor on an expedition, where he finds out that he's actually the king show more of a long-lost civilization that is the progenitor of the rest of the world... and that the queen of said civilization is identical to his wife. Things only get weirder from there. The book is never quite coherent-- it was serialized, and parts don't join up in a way that makes me think it was written from month to month-- and very rarely good, but it is entertaining. Its racial politics are complicated and not entirely understandable, but mostly progressive. And, to interest me, there's a lot of nutty stuff about the early history of psychology going on. show less

While not the greatest of novels Hopkins' "Of One Blood" does just enough (I won't say right, but I'll at least say well) that it warrants itself a read. The prose is gorgeous (though given the pulp-y kind of story Hopkins decides to tell it almost comes off as funny in some respects) and story itself, while definitely overwrought, is not without importance given the zeitgeist out of which Hopkins was writing. I won't go to far with this review simply because I don't have much else to say show more about the novel. I won't call it a trifle or a bauble of American literary history as it is far more important than that. But I will say that this is an unexpectedly engaging (if at times soap opera dramatic) telling of something that, in a lot of ways, really feels like it prefigures the likes of Flash Gordon, Tarzan, and much else of the pulp genre. Worth a look for its history and its prescience (though more as regards literary genre conventions than its own troubled history, just my two cents). show less

I have little time to read and no time to write now...but I can find enough time to say that this author writes beautifully with much atmosphere and some innocence even where cruel and ugly behavior prevails. Written in the days when people bought magazines, religiously following serial stories (do magazines still do that? I haven't read a magazine in at least 40 years!). You definitely get a cliffhanger, signaling the end of the installment until the next week. These novellas are in the show more public domain, I downloaded all three from the internet but have only read Winona so far. Winona can be found on Gutenberg Project. show less