Books book reviews History and Hauntings: Tall Is Her Body by Robert de la Chevotière Alex Brown reviews Robert de la Chevotière’s gorgeous magical realism story. By Alex Brown | Published on November 13, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share In his sophomore novel, Tall Is Her Body, Robert de la Chevotière examines the life of one man over the course of a few decades at the end of the 20th century. Fidel Rossi begins the story as a child and ends it as an adult approaching middle age. Throughout it, he is beset by brutality, death, grief, love, and spirits of the dead.  Told in first person, de la Chevotière weaves a stunning tale. Fidel recounts his life in a narrative style that is expressive yet easy to read. This feels like something being recalled out loud to a rapt audience rather than read off a page. Fidel is six-years-old when we meet him. Back then he lived with his mother on the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. They had a simple life, one of love and kindness. All that is ripped away from him one terrible night when she’s murdered in front of him. After, Fidel is passed around from family friends to relatives he barely remembers before ending up with an abusive aunt and a dying grandmother. Booms hates Fidel for reasons Fidel cannot fathom, and not even his grandmother’s admonishments of her daughter can stem the tide of her violence against him. Once he’s out of the rural village and into the city, he meets Lucy. For now she’s just a kid, but eventually she’ll become the woman who will define his adulthood in the way his mother defined his childhood and Booms his adolescence.  As shocking as his mother’s death was, it didn’t happen out of the blue. A gadèt-zafè, a local man who can see things other people can’t, warns her something bad is coming, but she doesn’t want to hear it. She wants nothing to do with Obeah, a Caribbean spiritual tradition brought over by enslaved Africans and melded with colonial religions and practices brought over by Muslim and South Asian laborers. That conflict—rejecting or refusing Obeah even when seeing it with your own eyes—forms the foundation of Fidel’s life going forward. No matter how much his mother wants to ignore Obeah, it’s already in her home because Fidel can see the dead.  The dead haunt him for most of his life. They follow him from house to house, they threaten, cajole, and care for him, and sometimes they even ignore him. Like his mother, he tries to drive Obeah away. He flees to Canada for college, seeking freedom in colonization. Fidel was first introduced into “becoming civilized” in a Catholic boarding school as a teen, and as an adult experiments with it again in Canada. Fidel literally sees the past, love and horror alike, and that past informs his present and his future. We cannot extricate ourselves from our heritage, not without killing what makes us who we are. Nor will white supremacy ever allow him—or any of us under the thumb of colonialism—to forget who and what he really is. I wish I could write a whole essay about Fidel’s experiences in Canada going from a majority Black place to one where they are few and far between, but I don’t want to spoil the novel. Black readers who live and work in predominately white spaces will see a lot of themselves in Fidel’s Canadian sojourn. I certainly did.  Buy the Book Tall Is Her Body Robert de la Chevotière Buy Book Tall Is Her Body Robert de la Chevotière Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget We also see the consequences of colonialism through some of the background economic events in the book. Fidel’s childhood homes, Guadeloupe and Dominica, are overrun with bananas at the beginning of the book. Bananas aren’t native to the Caribbean islands. They were brought by Portuguese invaders in the 15th century and spread rapidly from there. By the 20th century, whole economies in Central and South America as well as in the Caribbean were largely dependent on banana production. Companies like United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company intervened in politics to ensure their profits were high, even when the cost was paid by local laborers. (Standard Fruit, aka Dole, also had a hand in overthrowing the kingdom of Hawai’i in 1898, and staked their claim on the islands by dominating the production of another non-native plantation fruit: the pineapple.)  The book talks about the Lomé Convention, a deal established in the 1970s to facilitate trade between European countries and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States. The Lomé agreements collapsed in the 1990s with the consolidation of the European trade market. Fidel talks about how farmers poured everything they had into banana production, a thing forced on them long ago by colonizers and then taken away by those same colonizers when they were fully dependent on them, when their own traditions had been sidelined or beaten out of them. Colonizers escape unscathed while the people they oppressed are left struggling to pick up the pieces.  I’m making this book seem heady and dense, but it really isn’t. Robert de la Chevotière’s Tall Is Her Body is a gorgeous magical realism story about a boy becoming a man and reckoning with culture and identity, with generational trauma and parenthood, with past, present, and future. [end-mark] Tall Is Her Body is published by Erewhon Press. The post History and Hauntings: <i>Tall Is Her Body</i> by Robert de la Chevotière appeared first on Reactor.