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A review by lezreadalot
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn
4.0
She’s afraid she might drown. She remembers—too late—that Verdene had promised to teach her how to swim.
3.5 stars. An incredible read, and at the same time incredibly difficult to read. It skirts back and forth between just the type of thing that I've been yearning to read, and something that I'm not very interested in. But I ended up liking it.
We're mostly following Margot, a poor but ambitious worker at a hotel in her native Jamaica, and also the women who surround her: her secret lover Verdene, a village pariah recently returned from England; her mother Delores, who's known nothing but hard work all her life; and her little sister Thandi, on whose shoulders all her family's hopes rest. This was such a vivid portrayal of poverty; the way it's maintained and institutionalised by higher classes; the lengths to which people go to get out of it; the abuse and suffering that often surrounds it. There are so many things the book got, with pinpoint accuracy. I love reading books about and set in the Caribbean for lots of reasons, and one of them is being able to resonate with and identify with the language used and the images employed. In this case, I loved the descriptions of the river, community life, and just that scene where Thandi is sitting between Margot's legs getting her hair combed (with Blue Magic!!!!) and they're slapping away mosquitoes. Instant nostalgia. I also loved that this touched on colourism the skin-lightening epidemic, and all the ways black girls are taught to hate themselves and want to change themselves, to even believe that a better life is possible.
Dialect and slang used in books is my favourite thing ever, so that aspect was great, as well as seeing the code-switching that becomes second nature for some. I have to admit, I wished there was a little more consistency? Sometimes it would seem like a line of dialogue had been written completely in patois, and then someone went back and changed some things to standard English to make it more understandable, and as a result, a lot of dialogue read a bit awkwardly to me. Admittedly, this was probably necessary since, I guess, this is written for an international audience, and I'm not Jamaican so grain of salt, etc. But it was just noticeable, and some lines of dialogue felt like they didn't fit into the characters' mouths. I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't totally in the author's control.
As afore-mentioned, this is a hard book to read, and gets downright bleak at times, which... you know me. I never enjoy that. But that's unavoidable, with some of the subjects this book tackles. I love seeing queer characters in Caribbean lit, but it also isn't easy. All of our characters are used very hard, and several of them get to be downright unlikeable. But it's such an honest book, which is what I liked most about it. It's difficult living in a world where slavery and colonialism are over, but the remnants of it still linger long, and are vividly felt (especially in the era this is set, the 1990s).
Really enjoyable, but ooof.
Content warnings: