In the summer of 1989, sixteen-year-old Dionne Braithwaite and her ten-year-old sister Phaedra are sent from Brooklyn to Bird Hill, in the Barbadian parish of St. John, because their mother Avril, a nurse worn down by depression, the AIDS deaths of her patients, and the disappearance of her abusive husband, can no longer care for them. They land in the house of their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of obeah, in a village where their family has lived for generations. The sisters divide the island between them: Phaedra, who feels at home at once, trails her grandmother through births and village life and digs into the traces Avril left behind, while Dionne, who had been the family's caretaker in Brooklyn, chafes, tests limits, and looks for love and a way back. When word comes that the stay may become permanent, and their long-absent father Errol reappears offering to take them to America, both girls must choose between the Brooklyn they remember and the Barbados that is claiming them. Jackson's debut novel, written out of her own West Indian family's migrations, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
Author: Naomi Jackson · Original publisher: Penguin Press (New York), 2015
