Cartwheeling into the eternal return of the same. I couldn't help but think of Bolaño's 2666, and where he goes metaphysical, Roffey goes intersectional. Roffey's approach takes us along all the axes - gender, class, sexual, racial - and keeps pushing. Most of the time I was annoyed by her almost cartoonish presentation of intersectional politics, always insisting on different women taking part in this or that action (and we get a full set of references from ACT UP's die-ins to Occupy), naming names, stringing letters together as if reading from some NGO manual. Not that it isn't done with a lot of flair, but irony can only go so far. But then the ending that slaps. And I can't help but wonder - what can be done beyond the now familiar (and obviously ineffective) identity politics? How to not only interrupt the eternal return of the same, but to take apart the whole machine and all its cogs? The novel leaves us with this question.

Passiontide follows the St Colibri Carnival as a female steel-pan player if found dead underneath a tree. The women come together after this murder to protest femicide. Different women are followed such as Gigi who is a sex worker but also Daisy who is the First Lady of St Colibri. They need to speak out as women are not valued in St Colibri.

This was an important and intriguing read. It covers a serious topic that I feel is handled with care. The dialogue/writing in this was done well and considering the heavy topic was an easy read.

By turns exhilarating and bleak, this is an explosive story of what happens on a small Caribbean island when enough women stand up and say no: no to the patriarchy, no to misogyny, no to abuse, domestic violence and the global epidemic of femicide.

I don't want to say too much about the plot as readers deserve to encounter the story for themselves but I appreciated the way this taps into a wider global feminist concern while keeping the specifics tied to the Caribbean location. So much about the women's activism taps into the history of the island and its mix of races, ethnicities, faiths and religions. The music of the steel band is the soundtrack, and Roffey captures the cadences of speech beautifully. Importantly, the women unite across all categories: age, class, education, sexual identities, professions, health and bodily abilities. This also takes careful account of Caribbean history and the specific sensitivities spawned by centuries of colonisation, slavery and exploitation - and how that history might inflect constructions of masculinity, the family and the ever-presence of violence.

All of which makes this sound earnest - actually, it's a blast, with sharp, smart humour, and a truly stand-up-and-cheer feel about some of the scenes. The 'still not asking for it' scene had me snorting out loud! And there is at least one gorgeous, complicated love story.

But this is no fairy tale: for all the triumph of the women's rebellion, we all know change -real, deep, sustained change - is no easy, overnight thing: misogyny is deep and complex, there is too much at stake and very few people give up power knowingly and voluntarily. And Roffey's interesting afterword comments on how real life events hardened the ending.

Nevertheless, this is an all-in, passionate book, with fierce heroines and a bold, colourful trajectory - it's adult enough to keep things realistic, but it offers up a glorious vision at its heart - I loved it!