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There are two words that best describe River Mumma: “fast” and “furious”— although “different” would be a close third. Indeed, Zalika Reid-Benta’s debut novel takes a sharp left turn from Frying Plantain, her short story collection from 2019. That book was grounded in the realities of Toronto’s Little Jamaica. This one has a more fantastical quality to it. Part dream vision, part thriller, replete with curses, ghosts, and mysticism, River Mumma proves a fun if at times formulaic page-turner.

Set in present-day Toronto, the novel opens on a holiday celebration begrudgingly attended by its melancholy protagonist, Alicia Gale. Several months ago, the starry-eyed twenty-six-year-old finished grad school in New York, earning a master’s in English and founding a literary magazine along the way. Now she’s once again living with her overbearing mother, working a dead-end retail job, and depressed. She’d thought she was “on her way to becoming the...