Part historical fiction, murder mystery, and neo-slave narrative, Unburnable is a multi-generational saga that follows the African Diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean, offering a reinterpretation of black history.
The narrative of family, betrayal, vengeance, and murder follows a fictional character named Lillian Baptiste as she is willed back to her island home of Dominica from Washington, D.C., to finally settle her past.
Haunted by scandal and secrets, Baptiste had fled Dominica when she was fourteen after discovering she was the daughter of Iris, the half-crazy woman whose life was told of in chanté mas songs sung during Carnival: songs about a village on a mountaintop littered with secrets, masks that supposedly fly and wreak havoc, and a man who suddenly and mysteriously dropped dead.
Among the themes in the novel are the Caribs (the Kalinago), the Maroons, the history of Carnival and masquerade, the practice of Obeah, the fusion of African religions and Catholicism, resistance to slavery and post-colonial issues.
[2] Dalia King of The Trinidad Guardian in her review of the novel commented, "John weaves the weighty issues of race, sex and politics into the fabric of a historical Dominica without allowing the essential story of 'Unburnable'—that of a woman searching for her past so that she may find herself—to get lost in the novel’s own self-importance".