Sharon Sochil Washington’s The Blue Is Where God Lives is a mesmerizing, powerful work of Afro-magic realism that reclaims the promise of a family’s destiny through the bending of time.
 
Blue’s daughter, Tsitra, is dying a violent and horrific death while, thousands of miles away, Blue feels time slowing and hears voices, followed by a stillness that befalls her for 18 months.
 
More than a century before, Blue’s grandparents Amanda and Palmer attend a salon party in New Orleans. It’s a veritable who’s who within pre–Civil War social circles. Conversations get heated quickly as Ismay, the hostess who hails from French royalty—and who is the daughter of one of the most ruthless and wealthy slaveholders—antagonizes Palmer, a landowner and slaveholder himself whose parents had been sold into American slavery and who’s there to seek revenge, and Amanda, a shape-shifter and puzzle maker who had been enslaved until this very gathering. At this party, Amanda learns of a cosmic plot that will doom a line of her and Palmer’s family to poverty, so she devises her own counterplot to undo the damage.
 
Back in the present, Blue comes out of her stillness, broke and devoid of inspiration. In profound grief an