[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Donna Hemans, author of The House of Plain Truth, recommends Caribbean family sagas that expand the definition of “family.” See Hemans’s list of the recommended novels below, and an introduction by the author. For descriptions and full review, visit Electric Lit.
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein
Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique
What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You by Sharma Taylor
Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma
The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older
Dominicana by Angie Cruz
Growing up, I often thought of my mother as a collector of people. She collected people the way other people collect things. So it was never just us five—my parents and their three girls. Instead, people appeared, staying for various periods and disappearing: the live-in helpers; teens and young women my mother helped through some difficulty or family crisis; boarders who lived in our home and attended a neighborhood high school or community college; the gardener’s children who spent weekends and summer holidays with us and who my sisters and I helped with reading and math, much the same way we lined up our dolls on the verandah for our version of school.
For a large part of my youth, my “family” was a combination of people with various social and economic circumstances—some vastly different from my own. Caribbean family stories are often like that, stories of biological and found families, people who come together and pull apart for various reasons.
Often, the novels that are most transformative for me are those that explore atypical family dynamics and transcend conventional family stories. These eight Caribbean family sagas portray families formed by biology or culture, proximity or shared experiences. [. . .] For full article, see https://electricliterature.com/8-books-on-love-loss-and-betrayal-in-the-caribbean
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Donna Hemans, author of The House of Plain Truth, recommends Caribbean family sagas that expand the definition of “family.” See Hemans’s list of the recommended novels below, and an introduction by the author. For descriptions and full review, visit Electric Lit. Hungry Ghosts by
