num_pages: 256
description: From a magnetic new voice a debut story collection set in Jamaica and America for readers of Zadie Smith Helen Oyeyemi and Imbolo Mbue. There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me. Tenderness and cruelty loyalty and betrayal ambition and regretAlexia 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 twins chance sighting of his estranged brotherthe prodigal son of the familystirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In Bad Behavior a mother and father 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 international 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 mothers big new house in Jamaica which still holds the power to restore something vital. The winner of The Paris Reviews Plimpton Prize for Bad Behavior Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant lyrical intimate collection as one of fictions most dynamic and essential young authors.
language: None
title: How to Love a Jamaican
publisher: None