A review by serendipitysbooks
Pleasantview by Celeste Mohammed

challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

 
Pleasantview is a novel-in-short stories which exposes the darker side of the fictional Trinidadian town in which it is set. It’s a book I flew through. I really enjoyed raging at all the appropriate points - environmental abuse, hypocrisy, violence against women, corruption, misogyny, homophobia, racism and classism and more.

I loved the format. Just like in a mosaic where the image is greater than the sum of its individual tiles, so the stories in this book combined to make a novel richer and more powerful than its component pieces.

The combination of standard English and Trinidadian patois was really effective at transporting me to Pleasantview. I certainly have a much broader understanding of the variety of Trinidadian life and culture - much more varied and complex than the stereotypical Caribbean image suggests - after reading this book. I had to work for some of it, Googling terms I wasn’t familiar with etc. I’m happy to do so and see it as a strength rather than a weakness in the book. Sometimes books which cater strongly to white western readers feel like they’ve lost some authenticity in the process. That wasn’t the case here.

While there were no weak stories, the final story was one of the standouts for me. I had no idea that, per capita, more people travel to the Middle East to join Isis from Trinidad and Tobago than from any other Western country. Kings of the Earth is a chilling gut punch for the realistic way it shows one youth being slowly but surely drawn into the ISIS fold 
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