Patsy: A Novel

by Nicole Dennis-Benn Narrated by Sharon Gordon

Overview

When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy's plans don't include her overzealous, evangelical mother-or even her five-year-old daughter, Tru.



Beating with the pulse of a long-withheld confession, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to choose herself first-not to give a better life to her family back home. Patsy leaves Tru behind in a defiant act of self-preservation, hoping for a new start. But when Patsy arrives in Brooklyn, America is not as Cicely's treasured letters described; to survive as an undocumented immigrant, she is forced to work as a bathroom attendant and nanny. Meanwhile, Tru builds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica, grappling with her own questions of identity and sexuality.



Expertly evoking the jittery streets of New York and the languid rhythms of Jamaica, Patsy weaves between the lives of Patsy and Tru in vignettes spanning more than a decade as mother and daughter ultimately find a way back to one another.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

It’s tough to imagine anyone other than Sharon Gordon narrating this culture-rich novel about a Jamaican immigrant living in New York City. Gordon’s portrayal of a variety of Jamaican voices—from softly melodic Jamaican-American dialect to hearty Kingston street patois—keeps this performance soaring despite the hardships of the characters. Longing for a better life, as well as a rekindled relationship with her childhood friend who married an American, Patsy trades her Jamaican ghetto for New York City. Gordon’s precisely articulated English captures Patsy’s difficulties as an undocumented immigrant who struggles to make a living and become Americanized. The story’s greatest heartache involves Patsy’s daughter, whom she abandoned at age 5, as she struggles to find her identity back in Jamaica. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Judy Murray

"Redemptive parallel stories examine themes of identity, belonging, and self-fulfillment in Dennis-Benn’s (Here Comes the Sun) latest... Sharon Gordon beautifully captures the lilt of the many Jamaican voices as well as conveying the ambiguity of Patsy and Tru’s thoughts and feelings. This story may be better listened to than read. Highly recommended."

The Oprah Magazine O

"Sumptuous... Dennis-Benn ingeniously humanizes and changes up the typical immigrant saga... The result is a knowing, at times painfully funny novel about the disorienting relationship between selfhood and sacrifice."

Alexander Chee

"A stunningly powerful inter-generational novel about the price—the ransom really— women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity. Frank, funny, salty, heartbreaking, full of love, Dennis-Benn is a map-maker to those places in the heart held so closely, the holder may not know even they’re there."

Ms. Magazine - Alexia Arthurs

"[A] provocative, muscular book. Dennis-Benn takes care with characters, building intricate relationships, and writes in exquisite prose that brings to life Pennyfield, the Jamaican neighborhood Patsy is from, and the Caribbean diaspora in New York.... Draws the complexity of experiencing one’s sexuality, and the varying ways sexuality is understood in the larger community."

Chigozie Obioma

"Beautiful, shattering, and deeply affecting. Patsy’s story ultimately makes for a novel that is destined to endure."

Ilana Masad

"Nicole Dennis-Benn’s sophomore novel, Patsy, methodically and unapologetically engages with choices women do and should be allowed to make, and as with her last novel, Here Comes the Sun, does so with nuance and grace.... Patsy is a deeply queer, sensitive and vividly written novel about a woman’s right to want and a child’s right to carve her own path."

Candice Carty-Williams

"One of my favourite novels of 2017 was easily Nicole Dennis-Benn’s first novel, Here Comes the Sun, and when her second, Patsy, was announced, I almost lost my mind. The richness of Dennis-Benn’s writing is taken to another level in Patsy, the story of a Jamaican woman working towards her own version of the American dream.... Dennis-Benn explores in such a textured, taut way what in love is gained, and what, or who, is left behind.... Bliss."

Esme Weijun Wang

"A novel that splits at the seams with yearning, elegantly written and deeply felt. Dennis-Benn leads the reader through Patsy's life with empathy and grace."

Bustle - C.E. Miller

"While Patsy highlights the profound, and often unseen, sacrifices made in immigrants’ lives in America, it also emphasizes the struggles of those who are LGBTQIA+.... In the end, Dennis-Benn touches upon the question of whether or not America is even still the promised land for all identities seeking freedom from persecution."

Annie Bostrom

"Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun, 2016) builds big worlds inside and outside her touchable characters, writing through their knotty love in all its failures and mercies in this empathetic intergenerational epic of womanhood and inheritance."

The Atlantic - Adrienne Green

"Dennis-Benn gives her characters the dose of happiness and self-assurance that many stories about social ills refuse women like them. She does that without facilely wishing away the big issues—racism, homophobia, gender, classism—that her novel tackles. Patsy is a portrait of black queer women grasping for self-determination, and a challenge to the conventions of what is expected of good mothers and good women and good immigrants.... In writing beautifully about that unending struggle, Dennis-Benn finds a way to extend to black girls and women some of the love that the world may never offer."

Jodi Picoult

"Nicole Dennis-Benn is an exquisite writer who paints scenes with words so vivid you might as well be walking through it as a character, not a reader. In Patsy, she addresses motherhood, sexuality, racism, and colorism; turning her prodigious talents to the timely story of an undocumented immigrant straddling two worlds while learning that love isn’t a choice, but the beat in one’s blood."

Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Jenny Shank

"Patsy is a probing novel about freedom, examining one woman's shifting conception of it, and how people weigh what they are willing to trade for liberty.... The immigrant novel has a rich tradition in American literature.... Patsy adds to that lineage with its engrossing portrait of a complicated woman who struggles against crushing societal forces in her quest—not to sacrifice her life for future generations—but to finally unfurl her true self."

Cristina Henriquez

"An aching meditation on motherhood, sacrifice, and what it means to look truth in the face in order to fully become oneself. A beautiful book, as heartbreaking as it is restorative."

Elle

"Brilliant… [Dennis-Benn] writes with keen awareness of what others experience living undocumented in America—and the compromises that women make in order to prioritize themselves."

Entertainment Weekly - Leah Greenblatt

"Dennis-Benn writes about the immigrant experience with abiding, bone-deep empathy—swinging between standard English and patois the same way that Patsy and her daughter navigate their own need to code-switch as the years pass. Estranged from one another and bound to a world that tends to treat black womanhood and queer sexuality as invisible at best, their separate but intertwined stories wend through hurt and hope and inalienable dreams; not just for a better life, but a truly honest one."

Jenna Bush Hager

"It’s a story about resilience.... Patsy is a book that will open a lot of minds. I think particularly now, it’s critical that we open our minds to the way others live.... At the end this is a beautiful story of love."

TIME - Joshunda Sanders

"Stunning…. Patsy fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness."

NPR - Michael Schaub

"Admirers of Here Comes the Sun have waited three years for Dennis-Benn's followup, and anyone who was enchanted by her gorgeous writing are in for a happy surprise: Patsy isn't just as good as its predecessor, it's somehow even better.... Dennis-Benn isn't just a compassionate writer, she's also a courageous one, unafraid to address topics that too often go ignored. And in Patsy and Tru, she's managed to create two unforgettable characters who function as real people and not literary archetypes. Dennis-Benn is quickly becoming an indispensable novelist, and Patsy is a brave, brilliant triumph of a book."

San Francisco Chronicle - Caroline Leavitt

"Astonishing.... Dennis-Benn’s writing is ravishing, full of the musical rhythm of Jamaican dialect, sprinkled like hot spices throughout a narrative that is colorful, heartbreakingly sad and bristling with life."

New York Times - Chelsey Johnson

"Nicole Dennis-Benn carefully unspools the stories behind each wound over the long course of this richly imagined novel... [she] beautifully illustrates how the characters are connected to one another by love, desire and violence, and how they bear those histories permanently, both within and on their bodies. [Patsy] continually and subtly defies predictability as it tells a vital and remarkable life story.... I never knew what turn the story would take next, how the past would reassert itself, what alliances and rifts would form, where love would fail and where it would unexpectedly appear. Again and again, Patsy surprises and illuminates."

AUGUST 2019 - AudioFile

It’s tough to imagine anyone other than Sharon Gordon narrating this culture-rich novel about a Jamaican immigrant living in New York City. Gordon’s portrayal of a variety of Jamaican voices—from softly melodic Jamaican-American dialect to hearty Kingston street patois—keeps this performance soaring despite the hardships of the characters. Longing for a better life, as well as a rekindled relationship with her childhood friend who married an American, Patsy trades her Jamaican ghetto for New York City. Gordon’s precisely articulated English captures Patsy’s difficulties as an undocumented immigrant who struggles to make a living and become Americanized. The story’s greatest heartache involves Patsy’s daughter, whom she abandoned at age 5, as she struggles to find her identity back in Jamaica. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170244072
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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