June Reads
Did every book I read this month have something about overcoming a family curse in it? Whew. So much with the family curses. June was also Read Caribbean month, so I took that as my direction to read mostly books by Caribbean authors or about the Caribbean.
1.Blood to Poison by Mary Watson
South African teen, Savannah, tries to save herself from the family curse that threatens to kill her. Extreme anger is a mark of the curse’s onset and Savannah has a lot to be legitimately mad about.
2. Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud 🔥🌈
A widow and her son live together with a gay man in Trinidad. I worried the whole time it was going to reinscribe compulsory heterosexuality, and am not entirely satisfied with the way it ultimately doesn’t, but this one is tender and moving in the way it depicts the possibilities and impossibilities of non-traditional love and family in the Caribbean.
3. Rootless by Krystle Zara Appiah
Was here for what seemed like the compassionate ways this one dealt with postpartum depression and struggles with pregnancy and motherhood. But that was until I saw the way it resolves, in the last couple pages, the central plot of a woman who needed to run away from her family to save herself. It’s horrifying and excessive in how it punishes her and I do not recommend this book at all. Not even a little bit.
4. The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy 🌈
Intergenerational saga of a Bajan family who struggle with a legacy of various kinds of unbelonging. Everyone wants to escape, there’s a brief stint in Canada. Meh.
5. Untwine by Edwidge Danticat
Haunting story about twins and loss, and the slow unfolding of grief told only as Danticat can.
6. Frying Plantain by Zalika by Reid-Benta
Semi-autobiographical linked coming of age stories of a first generation Canadian daughter of Jamaican parents. It has everything from mean girls, to a cheating grandpa, to delectable descriptions of Jamaican food.
7. Pleasantview by Celeste Mohammed 🔥🌈
Character driven linked short stories. The way it all comes together will have you thinking for weeks.
8. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
Camina Rios and Yahia Rios have their worlds turned upside down when their father dies in a plane crash. Neither knows the other exists, but their father’s death brings his secrets to the fore and neither is the same again.
7. The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull 🔥
Aliens land in the US Virgin Islands. Thats all you need to know. Some things could be better executed, but there are so few books about aliens in the Caribbean that this one is a must read by default.
8. Dear Haiti, Love Alaine by Maritza and Maika Moulite
Co-written by sisters, it explores the more opulent side of Haiti and Haitian immigrants in Miami through a seventeen year old girl trying to break the family curse and save her mother. I don’t have a lot of patience for stories about Haiti and Haitian heritage being told from the perspective of the uber-privileged, but this one anticipated my disdain and tried to mitigate it.
9. Come Let Us Sing Anyway by Leone Ross 🔥🌈
These are witty and WONDERFUL stories about *everything* from talking inanimate objects like hymens and food, to scorchingly hot threesomes, to rolling calf and old higue on the catwalk, to headless school girls. Ross’s stories run the gamut of meditation on the fluidity of sexuality and personhood, the vagaries of capitalism, gendered violence, and environmental crisis, all the while maintaining levity, weirdness, and so much heart. I am in awe.
