Reviews with content warning for Suicide - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she’d made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage; this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth had taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out.”

TITLE—The Star Side of Bird Hill

AUTHOR—Naomi Jackson

PUBLISHED—2015

PUBLISHER—Penguin Press

GENRE—contemporary fiction

SETTING—Barbados & Brooklyn

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—home & home-going, family dynamics [esp. grandmother-mother-(grand/)daughters], heritage & inherited trauma, Bajan patois, suicide, depression, Death & Grief, funeral & grieving rituals, Christian & obeah beliefs & traditions, understanding the choices we & others make: agency vs. paralysis, the effects of subverted or disappointed expectations, childhood & coming-of-age, teaching & learning & growing, the vast nature of human complexity

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

BONUS ELEMENT/S—Reading this as a follow up to ANNIE JOHN was perfect.

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ”You practice being one kind of thing too long, and soon enough that's who you become."

PREMISE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

EXECUTION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

”In Brooklyn, Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear.”

My thoughts:

This was a beautiful novel exploring so many complex and beautiful themes including personhood & individual agency in the context of one’s family, colonized & diaspora identities, the nature of home, and the pain of and healing from death and grief.

Jackson’s intense and sympathetic insight into the feelings and personalities of so many differing human perspectives represented by the intricately realized characters in this novel was staggering. I loved how the seamless flow through all of the different POVs paralleled the intertwined nature of all of the characters’ identities. And Dionne’s character arc was truly transcendent.

Tbh I legitimately cried through almost this entire novel. I think the most unsettling and moving element for me was how much I related to the character of Avril. I also especially loved the church beach picnic and the funeral chapters. I definitely have a new auto-buy author to add to my list.

I would recommend this book to readers who enjoyed any of the books I list below under “Further Reading”. And who want to have their hearts properly shatteredddd. This book is best read as a follow-up to ANNIE JOHN but it’s not necessary—though it definitely made the experience richer for me.

Final note: Thank you so much to Akilah White for hosting and Naomi Jackson for presenting in the first discussion as part of the #WeTalkJamaicaKincaid series, part of the #WeReadJamaicaKincaid project on Instagram.

"What is all this, Granny?" Phaedra asked.
"Roots."
"You mean to do obeah with?"
"Dear heart, labels are for things, not people. I don't work obeah any more than Father Loving does when he says that a couple drops of holy water on a sick man's forehead can make him well. There's all kind of magic, some for daytime, and others for the night."
"So, it's all just different ways to make people well?"
"You could say that. All different ways to help the body do its work. Now, we need to find roots to make a tea."

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // childbirth, suicide, violent homophobia (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—

ANNIE JOHN, by Jamaica Kincaid
I, TITUBA, by Maryse Condé
HOMEGOING, by Yaa Gyasi
THE VANISHING HALF, by Brit Bennet (for the exploration of the theme of grandmother-mother-daughter dynamics)
BLUE, by Emmelie Prophète

Favorite Quotes—

”Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there's nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.”

”Her grandmother's words, about how if you practice being one kind of thing too long, you become that thing, were stuck in her head. Maybe that's what was wrong with Avril, she thought. Maybe it was a matter of her pretending to be sick at first and then, when it was time for her to be well, she didn't know how to be that way anymore.”

”From then, it was impossible to separate the idea of going to Barbados from the stark memory of Avril's anger. Bird Hill was for Phaedra, at first, as much a place to be banished to as a place to call home.”

“For Avril, staying on the move, or assuring herself that she would be leaving soon, was one way of trying to outrun her feelings.”

“…the different ways Phaedra and her sister saw the world in general and their parents in particular taught Phaedra that two people could feel different ways about exactly the same things, and that they could both be right.”

“Dionne didn't feel bad about lying to her mother. She knew intimately the precarious nature of their life, the way that it depended on a series of carefully constructed lies… The more lies Dionne told to protect her mother and herself and her sister, the easier it was to lie to her mother, to anyone, really. And by the time Dionne arrived in Barbados, lying was less a moral dilemma than a means of getting by.”

"Sweetness, the only thing that has power over you is what you can't say, even to yourself.”

Phaedra considered this for a moment, letting the night frogs fill the silence between them.

"Everything hurt needs sun and air to heal it," Hyacinth added, hearing what Phaedra had not said.

”She was not surprised to learn that she and her mother shared the same favorite verse: ‘No weapon formed against me

shall prosper.’”

“…and Avril constructed the lie of her competence so perfectly that it was hard for Hyacinth to know what was really going on.”

”Dionne still believed that Jean's problem, and Avril's too, was that they held too tightly to their status as outsiders, which Dionne couldn't understand, given how much she wanted a normal family, a normal life, and how little their being different had profited them.”

“…Phaedra had started to divide people into categories according to who had seen her city and so could understand her, and people who had not.“

“She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she’d made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage; this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth had taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband's fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the men who grieved too deeply the lives they'd wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them.”

"That's my girl. Sometimes people will come to you and ask you to do things you don't want to do. And the only right answer is no. You start using your head now, it will see you through hard times.”

“Mr. Jeremiah says that you can't be living your life and talking about living your life at the same time, that if you are, it's not really living you're doing.”

Content Warnings

More...