Mini Book Reviews! I love cupcakes and GOD LOVES HAITI

What does one do when one has dozens of books already read, not enough time to review them all, and lacking the motivation to write them all even if I had nothing but time?

Mini reviews!  Mini-versions of things are often so much better than the full-sized ones, anyway.  I give you cupcakes as evidence:

Why don't I have these in my face right now?  Life is hard.
Image found here. 

Now that we're agreed that mini things are often the best things, I feel good about giving y'all a couple of mini book reviews this week, starting with this one:

Dimity Elias Léger's debut novel, God Loves Haiti, opens with a scene of devastation moments after the 2010 earthquake ripped open the capital city of Port Au Prince. Natasha is newly married to the president of Haiti but in love with a young man named Alain, and we get chapters told from each point of view in the days leading up to and the weeks immediately following the quake.

This book put me very much in mind of Junot Díaz's writing, and his blurb, in fact, graces the front of the book.

Told with equal parts warmth and black humor, this novel is, more than anything else, a love song to the complicated and problematic nation and its resilience. As somebody whose cultural home is the similarly complicated and problematic state of Mississippi, I could immediately relate to and appreciate Léger's simultaneous love and frustration for a homeland that is not likely to be easily understood by outsiders.

I greatly admired this book, and if it weren't for the last few pages of epilogue, I could even say that I wholeheartedly loved it. That not withstanding, I believe that Léger is well on the way to writing a name for himself.

This book was published earlier this month from Amistad, a division of HarperCollins, and I read an advance reading copy provided to me at my request.  This book also qualifies for my diversify-your-life shelf because the author and the three principal characters are all POC. 

Book Review: Til the Well Runs Dry byLauren Francis-Sharma

It's not often that my two discrete audiences for this blog read the same posts.  My Book Blogger posse like the bookish ones, my Anguilla posse like the travel ones, and rarely the twain do meet, but I hope that today's post might find common ground between the two. It's a novel set mostly in Trinidad during the 1950s and 1960s, a time of political upheaval and change all over the Caribbean.

Author Lauren Francis-Sharma is the daughter of Trinidadian immigrants, and after visiting her grandmother's homeland, she decided to set her first novel there.  Though I've traveled up and down through the Caribbean, I've never been to Trinidad & Tobago, a dual island country unique in the region for its multi-ethnic heritage and industry beyond the usual tourism. Oh, and of course its tradition of Carnival. Trini Carnival makes all of those poor folks in New Orleans who celebrate Mardi Gras look like a child's clumsy efforts in comparison.

'Til the Well Runs Dry opens in the tiny village of Blanchisseuse in the 1940s, where Marcia Garcia is a 16-year-old seamstress trying to earn enough money to keep food in de bellies of what's left of her family. We soon meet Farouk Karam, the man whom she will grow to love and hate in equal measure, often simultaneously.  Farouk and Marcia share the narration for the first part of the novel until their second daughter adds her voice to the chorus.

If I were to describe this book in terms of its plot, it might sound very eventful--there are secrets here that politicians might kill to keep, not to mention rape, incest, murder, imprisonment, black magic, corruption, and abandonment--but that would give the wrong impression.  These plot points are present, but they're not the defining aspects of this novel.  It's much quieter and more intimate than that.  It's the story of a family: a mother whose hard knocks began long before her first two children go missing and her husband leaves her; a father whose thrall to his own parents prevents him from being the father he is capable of being; the four children who are the issue of this relationship that is more defined by tumultuous obsession than love.

Take this family and drop them in an ever-shifting political setting as Trinidad seeks its own way in the world separate from the British Empire, and you end up with a story that is as colorful and multi-layered as the book cover would suggest.  Francis-Sharma's writing is so evocative of this tropical island that I could see, hear, taste, and smell everything she was describing. Though the narratives themselves are third person, limited points of view, the dialogue is rich with the speech patterns and idioms of Caribbean patois.

I loved reading this novel and I was completely swept up in the complications of this family and their ties to each other, knotted up so tightly and frayed by the coastal salt water that it would take a machete to hack them apart.  More than anything, Francis-Sharma was able to convincingly portray what it might be like to love somebody so fiercely that surviving such a love could only change and harden and temper you into a fierce creature yourself.

I recommend this book for readers who value strong and complicated female characters, those who enjoy historical fiction in an unusual setting, and those who, like me, have an unquenchable thirst for Caribbeana.  There was much about this book that reminded me of early Toni Morrison, and honestly, is there higher praise that I could offer on that score?

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book that was provided at my request by the publisher.  It will be published in the US by Henry Holt on 22 April 2014. 

Book Review: The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller

I met Kei Miller in January of this year at Winter Institute down in New Orleans, where we chatted awhile about Caribbean literature.  I wish I had been bright enough at the time to remember that he had written The Same Earth, a book I have at home on my bedside table, but alas, no.  He signed an ARC of The Last Warner Woman for me and I've been saving it to read on my trip ever since.

"Once upon a time there was a leper colony in Jamaica." Thus begins this dual-narrative story of Adamine Bustamante, a girl born under mystical circumstances in said leper colony, who grows into her religious "gift of warning." It is the story of her childhood in Jamaica; her years in the Revivalists, a group believed to have the power of prophecy and resurrection; and lastly, her years locked up in an asylum in England, where it's more convenient for the government (and her husband) to take her religious fervor for madness.

The story of Adamine's life is a sad one, to be sure, but it's tempered so well with moments of humor that it's sometimes easy to forget you're reading a life of hardship.  But the main distinguishing feature of this novel, I'd say, is the narrative structure.  There are two ostensible narrators here: Adamine Bustamante in a fragmented, tell-it-to-the-reader-direct way, and the "character" of the writer himself, who both addresses the reader and reverts to a third person telling of Adamine's history.  Only occasionally do these two narratives corroborate each other; most of the time they are like the double helix of the DNA structure, looping out away from each other before crossing back in on each other, and then looping out again. 

I thought it was a fascinating structure, and while it's true that it leads to certain points of plot repetition, it's the changes in the small details between one narrator and the other that provides the richness of the text. I think, ultimately, that Kei Miller has given the reader a compelling story of a completely disenfranchised woman with successful meditations on meta-fiction, and anybody with an interest in fascinating characters, Jamaican literature, the roots of institutionalized racism (pun intended), or inventive narrative structure should give this book a spin.

NB: This book was published in the UK last year and in the US this April by Coffee House Press.  I received an ARC for attending Winter Institute.