How to Love a Jamaican

May 15, 2018
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 Jamaica--where the author spent her childhood--and 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(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 28, 2018
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.

June 1, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2018

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2018

In 11 stories, 2017 Plimpton Prize winner Arthurs captures the lives of Jamaican immigrants in America and the families they've left behind. Among the scenarios: a teenager is reunited with his mother in New York, and despairing parents leave their wild daughter with her strict grandmother in Jamaica. A debut novel is coming soon.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.