Jamaicans -- Fiction. |
Jamaican Americans -- Fiction. |
Short stories. |
Jamaican Americans -- United States |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
---|---|---|---|
Searching... Taunton Public Library | ARTHURS, ALEXIA | 1ST FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
"In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine."--Zadie Smith
An O: The Oprah Magazine "Top 15 Best of the Year" * A Well-Read Black Girl Pick
Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret--Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.
In "Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands," an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In "Mash Up Love," a twin's chance sighting of his estranged brother--the prodigal son of the family--stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In "Bad Behavior," a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In "Mermaid River," a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In "The Ghost of Jia Yi," a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in "Shirley from a Small Place," a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother's big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital.
Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction's most dynamic and essential authors.
Praise for How to Love a Jamaican
"A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience." -- Entertainment Weekly
"With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice." --O: The Oprah Magazine
"Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last." --Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true." -- Marie Claire
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Arthurs's enticing debut collection examines the lives of Jamaicans both in their homeland and abroad in America. "Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands" is a sharp study of two college friends in New York. Both are Jamaican, yet one's Northern California upbringing causes the other to question her racial identity. The devastating "Slack" begins with two young girls drowning in a water tank, and then rewinds the narrative to fill in the events that led to the tragedy. Other standouts include "We Eat Our Daughters," comprised of short vignettes of Jamaican women discussing their relationships with their mothers; "Island," concerning a recently uncloseted woman returning to Jamaica to attend a friend's wedding; and "The Ghost of Jia Yi," in which a Jamaican woman studying in Iowa struggles with the murder of a fellow international student. Between these successes, however, are narratives employing similar, yet drab, scenarios. "Mash Up Love," about a man who spends his day reminiscing about his twin brother, rambles, while "Mermaid River" employs a predictable frame to recall one character's upbringing on the island. Arthurs shoehorns in reoccurring faces sporadically to create a shared universe, yet only some of it sparks with life. Nonetheless, there are enough hits to make up for the misses. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In this debut story collection from Arthurs, winner of the 2017 Plimpton Award, readers meet Jamaicans in a wide spectrum of life moments. These Jamaicans have never left the island, or they've expatriated to the U.S., or they've repatriated back to Jamaica. Taken together, these individual lives give a sense of Jamaican community, a wide variety of people from a small island. One common theme, assumption versus reality, is flipped inside out when a Jamaican woman living in New York visits the island as a tourist for a destination wedding. That she's queer among straight people doubles down on her outside-looking-in observations. In other stories, readers learn: don't be slack, cornmeal porridge makes a proper breakfast, and running fast can get you to college in Iowa but it is cold and dark there. The title story tries to make peace with a man in his late sixties who loves his wife and two daughters as well as the son none of them know about. Jamaican realities contemplated through many engaged and interesting eyes.--Dziuban, Emily Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
Pride and racial prejudice in a visceral portrait of the Jamaican experience at home and in the US This debut story collection might sound like a slightly salacious instruction manual, but thoughtful readers will find a book that defies every dreadlock-lovin, Usain-Bolt-cheerin, ganja-smokin stereotype. Alexia Arthurs takes two subset communities Jamaicans who live at home (or return there) and Jamaicans who live in foreign, in the US and presents their stories with compassion, tenderness and an unassuming complexity. For a start, she compromises nothing, including the perennial way that race informs everyday life. The collection is a visceral portrait of the subtler costs of social inequality how, as minorities, we are watchers of ourselves and others, code-switching or swapping language depending on who were talking to, with a self-consciousness that becomes habitual. Many readers in the UK will relate to it. Arthurs' masterful handling of womens sexual selves is reason enough to read this sensual, funny, sad book In Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands, two NYU students with Jamaican parents test the fragile limits of friendship, class and skin-shade privilege. Arthurs characters regard the lives, morals and experiences of white and black people as different (It wasnt that Jamaican children were perfect it was that when they made mistakes, they knew how to be ashamed). Frequently, they do not expect to be fully understood unless they are home. In Bad Behavior, winner of the Paris Reviews Plimpton prize, parents take their force-ripe teenager back to Jamaica, hoping the pit toilet and her grandmother will fix her, and of course they do. Arthurs explores an ambivalence, too: however nostalgic we are, the island is a source of redemption and worry. It breeds both guilt and pride. Her masterful handling of womens sexual selves those secret spaces where the urgency to feel loved is everything is reason enough to read this sensual, funny, sad book. In The Ghost of Jia Yi, a depressed Jamaican athlete sleeping with her roommates boyfriend is haunted by the ghost of a murdered international student. Whether you relate more to teenage Pepper, ashamed of her older lover with three teeth hanging outside her school gate in the heartbreaking Slack, or to the protagonist in Island, contemplating the easy rightness of her first lesbian kiss, this is a hymn to women: stoic and pained and lyrical. My surprise favourite might be Shirley from a Small Place: in a story obviously inspired by singer Rihanna, we see a pop star who is deeply human - contemplating her period or her hair weave, purple as star-fruit; running home to cry into her mothers chicken-foot soup. Arthurs gives men a tender complexity, too: the quiet twin forever condemned to live in his gregarious brothers shadow in Mash Up Love and the tender ruminations of an older man in the titular story, sitting on a rotten tree stump, both sorry and glad for the son only possible through his infidelity. If youre not Jamaican, what you have here is a special opportunity to see who we actually are: were not at all like you, but absolutely the same. Mostly, Arthurs has written a love letter to Jamaicans, and it feels so good. Yes, iyah. Bless up. - Leone Ross.
Kirkus Review
Jamaican immigrant and return-migration stories told with unsentimental honesty.Eleven short stories examine the immigrant experience through the prism of place, food, gender, and generations; in this collection, the home lands are Jamaicawhere the author spent her childhoodand the United States. Far from pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap mythology, and thankfully devoid of violin-swelling nostalgia, these stories unravel the knot of being in a place but not quite belonging and the sense of missing but not quite understanding what was lost. In "Bad Behavior" (winner of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction), what could have been written as a contest of wills turns out instead to be an examination of three generations of women in a Jamaican family. The "bad behavior" belongs to the youngest, 14-year-old Stacy, who was caught giving a boy a blow job in school. Delivering Stacy to her granny Trudy in Jamaica, Pam, the girl's frantic mother, hopes Trudy will love her granddaughter "enough to show her some of the harshness that the world was ready and able to give her." In reality, Stacy, like her mother and grandmother before her, has already experienced several harsh realities. In "Mermaid River," a mother leaves her son with his grandmother while she settles in the U.S. This story artfully swings back and forth between the boy's childhood in Jamaica to the time when he finally rejoins his mother and her husband as a young teen in Brooklyn. Other stories feature young adults, long detached from but not quite severed from their Jamaican roots, with various levels of self-awareness. "Only now does the history of that river sit on me," says the narrator of "Mermaid River." The same can be said of this strong debut collection, which beckons the reader back, again and again.A lovely collection of stories that rewards subsequent readings. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Some of the stories in this first collection from Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Arthurs have been published in literary magazines, including "Bad Behavior," which won the Paris Review's Plimpton Award. But the majority are freshly minted, and they are all perpetually engaging. The protagonists are mainly Jamaican, of Jamaican descent, or African American, but the inclusion of white American, African, and Asian characters adds richness to stories as a conversation about race and gender. "Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands," for example, shows the complicated friendship between two Jamaican students, one from the island and the other from California, who knows little about the home of her parents. While the stories have a rawness to them, exploring topics such as sexual orientation, parental relationships, self-discovery, and drug use, Arthurs also offers a sure feel of the mysticism of the Caribbean. Mermaids and water, particularly Mermaid River, are central to many of the pieces, as is the theme of death; "The Ghost of Jia Yi" shows how truly connected we are no matter where we are born. VERDICT Stylistically reminiscent of Toni Morrison's Paradise, this successful debut will appeal to readers of literary and Caribbean fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]-Ashanti White, Fayetteville, NC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.