The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

Overview

Two sisters are suddenly sent from their home in Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, in this stunning debut novel
 
This lyrical novel of community, betrayal, and love centers on an unforgettable matriarchal family in Barbados. Two sisters, ages ten and sixteen, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live for the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah.

Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother’s limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother’s mysterious life.

This tautly paced coming-of-age story builds to a crisis when the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family.

Jackson’s Barbados and her characters are singular, especially the wise Hyacinth and the heartbreaking young Phaedra, who is coming into her own as a young woman amid the tumult of her family.

Praise for The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Jackson has written a first novel full of heart and heartbreak, a novel about going home, about the ties that bind three generations of women across years and despite absence. It is a bittersweet lesson in learning to recognize love.”
—Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection)

“Naomi Jackson has written a tender novel exploring the complexities of motherhood and childhood. The Star Side of Bird Hill holds together opposing elements—the book is quiet in the telling, but the story being told is sharp and vibrant. It is as much a story of the fears of childhood as it is a story about welcoming old age with optimism. A book that knows death and discovery. A book laced with pain but shimmering with hope. With care, the narrative addresses huge issues, such as mental illness, mortality, sexuality, and, at its very core, what it means to love another person as they are.”
—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698152281
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/30/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	705,188
File size:	614 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

NAOMI JACKSON was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. She studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Maytag Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction to complete her first novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill. Jackson traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, Jackson has had her work appear in literary journals and magazines in the United States and abroad.

Read an Excerpt

The people on the hill liked to say that God’s smile was the sun shining down on them. In the late after­noon, before scarlet ibis bloodied the view of sunset, light flooded the stained-glass windows of Bird Hill Church of God in Christ, illuminating the renderings of black saints from Jesus to Absalom Jones. When there wasn’t prayer meeting, choir rehearsal, Bible study, or Girl Guides, the church was empty except for its caretaker, Mr. Jeremiah. It was his job to chase the children away from the cem­etery that sloped down behind the church, his responsibility to shoo them from their perches on graves that dotted the backside of the hill the area was named for. Despite his best intentions, Mr. Jeremiah’s noontime and midnight devotionals at the rum shop brought on long slumbers, when children found freedom to do as they liked among the dead.

Dionne Braithwaite was two weeks fresh from Brooklyn, and Barbados’s fierce sun had already transformed her skin from its New York shade of caramel to a brick red. She was wear­ing foundation that was too light for her skin now. It came off in smears on the white handkerchiefs she stole from her grandmother’s chest of drawers, but she wore it anyway, because makeup was her tether to the life she’d left back home.

Dionne was sixteen going on a bitter, if beauti­ful, forty-five. Although she thought herself above the things the children on Bird Hill did, she liked the hiding place the graveyard behind the church provided.

Dionne’s younger sister, Phaedra, played tag among the miniature graves of children, all casual­ties of the 1955 cholera outbreak. Nineteen girls and one boy had died before the hill folks abandoned their suspicion of the world in general and doctors in particular to seek help from “outside people.” This was just one of the stories that Dionne and Phaedra’s mother sum­moned as evidence for why she left the hill the first chance she got.

Phaedra and her sister arrived from Brooklyn at the beginning of the summer. Phaedra was small for her ten years. Her skin had darkened to a deep cacao from run­ning in the sun all day in spite of her grandmother’s protests. She wore her hair in a French braid, its length tucked away from the girls who threatened her after reading about Samson and Delilah in Sunday school. Glimpses of Phaedra’s future beauty peeked out from behind her pink heart-shaped glasses, which were held together with scotch tape.

Reading Group Guide

Dear Readers,
 
Thank you so much for choosing The Star Side of Bird Hill for your book club!
 
The Star Side of Bird Hill is the story of a family torn apart by loss and pieced back together by love. It’s the summer of 1989: Phaedra Braithwaite is ten years old and her sister, Dionne, has just turned sixteen when they are both sent from Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, Hyacinth. Their emotionally fragile mother, Avril, can no longer care for them, so their grandmother takes charge. When the girls’ father arrives in Barbados with questionable intentions to bring them back to the United States, Phaedra and Dionne confront the question of whether they will continue living in Barbados or return home.
 
I wrote the novel in order to explore the question that dogged me as a child. “What if my parents sent me home and never came back for me?” I grew up in New York City, but my family traveled home often to the Caribbean. Sometimes my parents would drop us off for the summer as soon as school let out and joke that they might not come back for us. Writing Star Side was a way to explore that “what if” question.
 
I also wanted to examine what it feels like to identify strongly with a culture or country where you might be considered an outsider. I felt this way often, the dissonance of “feeling” Caribbean, while not being Caribbean enough when I traveled home to Antigua and Barbados. A lot of the book concerns who’s on the inside and who is on the periphery of a community through descriptions of the insular Bird Hill and characters like Phaedra, Dionne, Hyacinth, and Avril’s close friends, Jean and Mrs. Loving.
 
In this book you’ll discover one memorable matriarchal family. I hope that you’ll find something in their relationships and experiences that resonates with you. The book confronts a lot of the questions that are still relevant for me today. What does it mean to love someone as they are? How can we make space to acknowledge and forgive people’s shortcomings, including our own? What are the challenges and drawbacks of straddling two cultures? What is the purpose and place of religion in our lives? How does mental illness affect not only the person who is sick but also the people who love them?
 
Writing The Star Side of Bird Hill has been a bittersweet and exhilarating process. Over the course of the last six years since I first started writing the book, I have graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked on Star Side in cities as different as Brooklyn, Bridgetown, Iowa City, Philadelphia, and Cassis in the South of France. I also lost my grandmother, who lived in Barbados, and whose life, home, and sense of humor deeply informed the book. The best part of working on this book was spending an entire summer in Barbados writing and learning more about the island where my mother’s family is from. I have shared some pictures from my trip here.
 
 
I hope that you enjoy the novel, and that it will spark some lively and fun discussion in your book club!

Best,
Naomi Jackson

1. What compelled you to write this book?

I grew up in a predominantly West Indian neighborhood in Brooklyn and spent summers in Barbados (where my mother’s from) and in Antigua (where my father’s from) with my sister and a gang of cousins. It was in Barbados and Antigua that I first understood the trickiness  of the hyphen between Caribbean and American, that I could be as much an outsider there as in Brooklyn. I can remember being teased mercilessly for my Yankee  accent. During those long, hot days, I became a voracious reader, the first step towards becoming a writer. I wrote The Star Side of Bird Hill to explore these experiences and to examine issues that are important to me, namely family, mental illness, sexuality, religion. Writing the book was also a way to answer a question that always dogged me: What would happen if, like my parents sometimes joked, they sent me home to the Caribbean for the summer, and left me there for good?

2. How did your childhood straddling different cultures and geographies influence the book?

I definitely struggled with feeling like an outsider, not feeling Caribbean enough when I traveled home to Antigua and Barbados. Now, I have a better understanding of the material and experiential differences of living in the Caribbean vs. in the States, for example, the privilege of being able to travel on an American passport. I used to be bothered by the discomfort, but I have come to see my status as an outsider as a gift. It certainly has helped my writing. When I traveled to Barbados to research the book, being perceived as an outsider gave me an excuse to switch into “learning mode,” asking questions as I tried to understand the rhythms of speech and culture of Barbados. Being an outsider means that there’s little I take for granted; my unique perspective straddling cultures has trained my ear and eye to listen and look for what’s truly interesting and peculiar about a particular place.

3. You describe Dionne early on as “sixteen  going on a bitter, if beautiful, forty-five.” She’s exasperated with  her new home and acts out, yet her grief and anger toward her mother and grandmother run true and deep. She’s caught right in between childhood and adulthood—a moment in one’s  young life that is both  claustrophobic in experience and universally understood by anyone even a few years past it. Can you talk about getting into  Dionne’s head? Did you revisit your teenage years when developing her character?

With Dionne, I wanted to explore all the emotions at work inside her—grieving the loss of her mother, the discomfort of being unburdened of responsibility for her younger sister, missing her friends and life in Brooklyn, and feeling out of step with Barbados and her grandmother’s rules. I was an angst-ridden teenager, so I had plenty of material to work with when I was crafting Dionne’s character. I certainly drew on that experience when I was writing Star Side, and I think that anyone who’s survived their teenage years can relate to this book.

4. Phaedra, at ten years  old, adjusts more  readily, absorbing stories from Hyacinth and eagerly exploring her new home.  How did you imagine Phaedra’s experience of Bird Hill versus her older sister?

I have an older sister to whom I am very close, and I am always struck by how different we are and how differently we experience exactly the same events. Since Phaedra is a nerd with few friends back home in Brooklyn, she doesn’t have as much to lose in coming to Barbados. In fact, she comes to love her new friends, Chris and Donna, and finds solace in her grandmother’s  company. I imagined that a younger  child would  be more open to spending time with her grandmother and seeing the beauty and intrigue in new surroundings. For Phaedra, spending time in Bird Hill, where her mother grew up, allows her to feel closer to her mother, Avril.

5. Bird Hill is a real place in Barbados. How much  of the Bird Hill in your novel is informed by the actual place, and what was created through your writing and the eyes of the girls?

The real Bird Hill is in a community called Haggatt Hall in St. Michael, Barbados. My grandmother lived there, and I visited her there when she was still alive. I can definitely see the ways that the real Bird  Hill influenced the Bird  Hill of the novel, but there are important differences. The Bird  Hill in the novel is rural, and more reflective of the less developed place that I visited in the 1980s than the Bird  Hill that exists now. (For example, there’s a printing shop where there used to be a pig shed.) There are some sweet similarities though—my granny’s house really did have the words Why Worry? written on the threshold, there is a gorgeous grove of guava trees, and my grandmother’s beloved church still stands today, at the top of a slight incline.

6. In some ways, The Star Side of Bird Hill is about the myriad ways in which  families—parents, children, siblings, grandparents—struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.  How did you approach writing about this family?

Family is tricky. There can be so many misunderstandings and so much trauma bound up with our experiences of the first people who are meant to love us and keep us safe. I wanted to write a book that illustrated the complexity of one family at one moment in time, without coming to any easy conclusions about how they overcome the circumstances they find themselves in. In my personal life, I’m both close to my family and very aware of the hard work we have done (and continue to do) to maintain both our independence and our relationships to each other. With this book, I wanted to offer up some of what I experienced and figured out about family to people who were thinking and feeling through these things for themselves.

7. Why did you choose to set the book in 1989?

I had a variety of personal, political, and historical reasons for setting the book in 1989. The summer of 1989 was an important one for me personally, as it was the year that my sister and I began living with our father and stepmother after years of being raised by our mother. It was a radical shift after which nothing in my life was ever the same. More broadly, 1989 saw the election of David Dinkins as the first black mayor of New York City, a couple years before the Crown Heights riots. It was also the height of the AIDS crisis and AIDS  activism in New York City; 100,000 AIDS  cases were reported in the United States that year. My relationship to the Caribbean changed in the wake of 1988’s Hurricane Gilbert, which wreaked havoc across the region, especially in Jamaica. Setting the book in 1989 allowed me to feed off these touchstones in my personal life and in the history of New York City and the Caribbean. Finally, I wanted to set the book in the late 1980s because that was the Barbados that I visited as a child.

8. Avril sends Dionne and Phaedra to live with Hyacinth after  she can no longer care for them. Throughout the book, we see glimpses into their past lives in Brooklyn and how Avril retreated further and further into herself and Dionne took on the responsibility of caring for her mother and sister.  Can you describe your approach to writing about mental illness and how it is experienced by Avril and those who love her?

Writing about Avril’s mental illness was one of the things that I worked hard to get right. I wanted to make sure that readers would see Avril’s tenderness as a mother, her desire to do right by her children, and witness with compassion the ways in which she falls short of her best intentions. I wanted to focus less on diagnosis, medication, episodes, etc., and more on the children’s experiences of Avril’s illness—the ways that the girls are affected by her neglect and eventually forced to parent each other and themselves. I also wanted to show Hyacinth’s helplessness and regret in the face of her daughter’s illness and the distance between them. Overall, I was determined to show how families are affected by mental illness, and to show readers that people with mental illness are both worthy and capable of love.

9.  Tell us about Jean.  Why do you introduce him to readers through Phaedra’s eyes?

Jean is one of my favorite characters in the book, and I hope that readers will come to love him as much as I did. He’s one of Avril’s close friends, and I thought that Phaedra would try to work through some of her grief about her mother’s passing by spending time with people who knew her. I introduced Jean through Phaedra’s eyes because she’s kind, and curious, and therefore the character who was least likely to be judgmental of Jean, who is gay, and the son of a sex worker.

10. Back  in Brooklyn, “Dionne had learned from her mother that if you wanted to keep a man, he should love  you at least a little bit more than you loved him.” (p. 49) Tell us about Dionne’s relationships to the boys and men she meets in the book.

Dionne’s most important relationship with a man is the strained one that she has with her father, Errol, who abandons the family when she is still a child. At the risk of sounding corny, I think that Dionne is searching for her father in her flirtations and the relationships she has with boys. She dates a lot when she first arrives in Bird  Hill – there’s the son of the local pastor, Trevor, a boy she meets at the church picnic, Chad, and then a guy she meets at the Grand Kadooment Day parade during Crop Over. It takes her the entirety of the summer, and seeing the extent of her father’s failings as a man and as a parent, for Dionne to learn to stop grasping for sexual attention from boys, and instead to meet both the boys she likes and herself on the firm ground of friendship. It’s important to me that readers experience Dionne’s sexual awakening as a natural part of her growing up, rather than judge her.

11. Hyacinth signs the girls up for Vacation Bible School upon their arrival, because she believes “idle hands were the devil’s playground.” Religion and church activities are threaded throughout the novel—how do you feel religion serves our main three characters?

I grew up in a religious family, so it’s no surprise that religion shows up in the book. I was an acolyte in my Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, and my grandmother shuttled us off to Vacation Bible School (VBS) in Antigua. For a long time, I wanted to be a priest. For Hyacinth, the church is a way for her to connect with her friends and draw strength in the face of her trials, and VBS is a way to keep her granddaughters out of her hair and out of trouble. For Phaedra, prayer and hymns and the church are a way to draw closer to her mother. Dionne finds the church confining and prescriptive, though I imagine that her relationship to church and relationship might change as she grows older.

12. At the heart of the book is this unforgettable matriarchal family. What does it mean to you to create these earnest, hardened, funny, grieving, loving—in a word, complicated—female characters on the page?

I aimed to create characters who were every bit as complex as the women who raised me and the women who I have chosen as friends. I also wanted to pay homage to the matriarchal family structure that’s common in the Caribbean but often lamented for its lack of strong male figures. I think there’s  a lot to celebrate in the ways that knowledge and love and joy are shared within these families. I believe the book will resonate with anyone who’s had a complicated relationship with their sister, mother, or grandmother, or the place that they call home.

Editorial Reviews

What is worth holding on to when you've inherited a legacy of loss?…Jackson's vibrant debut…finds three members of a newly minted family in varying degrees of distress, trying to answer that question…Jackson makes much of the missing Avril, allowing her absence to haunt each character in such a complex way that we know them as much by their grief as by the actions they take to soothe it. Hyacinth's night walks, Dionne's sexual experiences, Phaedra's quest to be good all make real the transformation that occurs when the hope for a gentle outcome dies and you "become someone else, even if you didn't intend to at first." That point becomes significantly deeper as Jackson gestures toward the legacy of slavery in Barbados and the weight of cultural inheritance.

The New York Times Book Review - Mira Jacob

05/18/2015
Jackson's debut novel is a bittersweet coming-of-age tale of heartbreak and loss. Dionne and Phaedra, 16 and 10, are two sisters who go to Barbados in the summer of 1989, in the care of their grandmother Hyacinth, when their depressed mother is no longer able to take care of them in New York. Dionne acts out and meets boys, while Phaedra immerses herself in her grandmother's world. When their circumstances suddenly change and dictate a more permanent stay in Barbados, the girls are angry and confused. Their unfamiliar situation is further compounded by the reappearance of their long-gone father. He presents a chance to return to America, if they can trust him, and if they choose to leave their grandmother. Jackson's story becomes stronger and stronger as we get to know these characters. The themes she touches on—mental illness, immigration, motherhood, sexual awakening—are potent and deftly juggled, anchored in the vivid locale of Bird Hill yet universally relatable. Readers will be turning the pages to follow Phaedra and Dionne's memorable journey. (June)

Publishers Weekly

The evocation of the island is romantic and alive…Jackson renders [the characters’] inner lives effectively.”
—The New Yorker

 
“The Star Side of Bird Hill is, at its core, a story about mothers and daughters. But the rich and colorful world Ms. Jackson renders on the page moves well beyond that, too, setting itself the task of exploring so much more…Ms. Jackson has a deft hand with characterization — all of the people she creates feel utterly human…There are questions, pain, tenderness, and also wisdom in [the] writing…Naomi Jackson vividly delivers two entirely different worlds and a whole range of experiences that taught me a little bit more about how to be a better human.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
“Stunning…Poignant…Jackson vividly evokes the landscape, the personalities of this Bird Hill community, as she explores the difficulties of the immigrant experience, the certainties of living all your life in one place vs. the claustrophobic aspect of having the past and family define who you are and will be in the future…Jackson’s writing is to be savored.”
—Buffalo News

“Once in a while, you’ll stumble onto a book like this, one so poetic in its descriptions and so alive with lovable, frustrating, painfully real characters, that your emotional response to it becomes almost physical…[A] wrenching debut…The dual coming-of-age story alone could melt the sternest of hearts, but Jackson’s exquisite prose is a marvel too...A gem of a book. A”
—Entertainment Weekly
 
“From Maryse Condé to Edwidge Danticat to Tiphanie Yanique, contemporary Caribbean writers have produced an exquisite literature of diaspora and affirmation, richly depicting the dreams and disappointments of their characters. Now Naomi Jackson joins their ranks with The Star Side of Bird Hill, a serious yet effervescent debut that showcases three generations of women as they grapple with conflict and loss during the fateful summer of 1989…Jackson brings the lush textures of Barbados to the fore: sugar cane fields and smelly fish markets, raucous festivals and an extended wake called ‘nine-nights’…More than a coming-of-age novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill evokes the intractable forces that tear at families and cultures.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune  

“[The Star Side of Bird Hill] belongs to Phaedra, an unforgettable character and the best thing about the novel. She's complex, smart and has a sense of introspection that her sister seems to lack…Jackson’s evocative, lyrical writing…makes Barbados come to life, and she’s comfortable with both humor and pathos…A lovely [book], and Jackson seems likely to have a distinguished career ahead of her.”
—NPR.org

“[A] keen-eyed debut…At the novel’s core is a tender coming-of-age story that explores the complications of Dionne's first affair with a young suitor (the title refers to her favorite churchyard getaway spot) and the realizations that Phaedra has about her family and her connection to them all, despite their flaws…A lush and sensitive read with a setting well matched for a sultry summer afternoon.”
—Oprah.com

“Holy cats, this novel is wonderful…Lyrical, a really stellar debut.”
—BookRiot

“Naomi Jackson is our new favorite writer.”
—PureWow

“Watching these three characters find their way to that support reveals the heart of The Star Side of Bird Hill—riveting in its story of family and love, and all the more so because of the nuanced differences Jackson has so skillfully written into each of her characters.”
—Shelf Awareness

“Lyrical.”
—Travel + Leisure
 
“The Star Side of Bird Hill moves forcefully between Barbados and Brooklyn in this plangent coming-of-age debut novel about two sisters torn between their absent father’s reappearance and their strong, matriarchal island family.”
—Elle

“Satisfyingly complex…Jackson’s lyrical descriptions of the island’s natural beauty and rich culture…[set] this book apart.”
—Bustle

 “A winning coming-of-age tale with Caribbean flavour.”
 —BBC.com

“A heartbreaking coming-of-age story, The Star Side of Bird Hill is ultimately about the choices we must make about love and family, and what it means to go home.”
—Buzzfeed

“Moving…[Jackson] has delivered a novel of remarkable strength and beauty as she chronicles the sojourn of two sisters to their mother’s homeland of Barbados for the summer…This is a story of sisterhood and tough, unbreakable love. This is a book that asks: What happens when you go home and find the answers you didn’t know you were looking for?”
—Gawker

“A striking accomplishment filled with heartbreak and characters you want to bittersweetly hug…A story about sisterhood, family, and what ‘home’ means, The Star Side of Bird Hill is not a book you dare to forget.”
—Hello Giggles

“The writing is especially fine, with even minor characters benefiting from Jackson’s lyrical descriptions…[THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL] recall[s] Toni ­Morrison’s Love.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“A bittersweet coming-of-age tale of heartbreak and loss…Jackson's story becomes stronger and stronger as we get to know these characters. The themes she touches on—mental illness, immigration, motherhood, sexual awakening—are potent and deftly juggled, anchored in the vivid locale of Bird Hill yet universally relatable. Readers will be turning the pages to follow Phaedra and Dionne's memorable journey.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Many moments of awareness…permeate this delightful debut novel. An engrossing and poignant coming-of-age story populated with engaging, well-drawn characters.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Rich in the aspect and feel of the Caribbean…A charming, laid-back bildungsroman and an uplifting story about the importance of a stable, loving home and the embrace of one’s culture.”
—Booklist

"The Star Side of Bird Hill reads as if we’re let in on a sometimes wonderful, sometimes thrilling, sometimes terrible secret. It’s the unwritten history of women without men, of girls in conflict with themselves and the damage—and healing that can come from the same place: Family."
—Marlon James, author of A Brief History Of Seven Killings

"Naomi Jackson packs a hell of a lot of love and death and magic into this wonderful debut. The Star Side of Bird Hill travels between Barbados and Brooklyn telling the story of a family, and a people, who move between worlds and world views. But really this is the story of one young girl named Phaedra who is trying her best in a world that doesn't always see the best in her. There are touches of Jamaica Kincaid and J.D. Salinger here, but Naomi Jackson is an artist all her own."
— Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver

“Jackson has written a first novel full of heart and heartbreak, a novel about going home, about the ties that bind three generations of women across years and despite absence. It is a bittersweet lesson in learning to recognize love.”
— Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection)

“Naomi Jackson has written a tender novel exploring the complexities of motherhood and childhood. The Star Side of Bird Hill holds together opposing elements—the book is quiet in the telling, but the story being told is sharp and virbrant. It is as much a story of the fears of childhood as it is a story about welcoming old age with optimism. A book that knows death and discovery. A book laced with pain but shimmering with hope. With care, the narrative addresses huge issues such as mental illness, mortality, sexuality and, at its very core, what it means to love another person as they are.”
—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning

 

From the Publisher

★ 06/01/2015
With this work, Fulbright scholar and Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Jackson joins her peer Angela Flourney, author of the just-published The Turner House, in continuing the rich tradition of African American storytelling. In the summer of 1989, the mentally fragile Avril sends her daughters, ten-year-old Phaedra and 16-year-old Dionne, to visit their grandmother in Bird Hill, Barbados, while she works to build a better foundation for them after their father leaves her destitute. The island provokes culture shock in Dionne, who misses her life in Brooklyn and rebels against her grandmother. Phaedra, on the other hand, feels at home on the island, as she draws wisdom from the grandmother she barely knew. Interestingly, Avril, who rarely appears in the narrative, is the glue that binds everyone together, including the father who shows up after her death to claim his daughters. The writing is especially fine, with even minor characters benefiting from Jackson's lyrical descriptions. VERDICT Recalling Toni Morrison's Love, this work will appeal to fans of African American and literary fiction.—Ashanti White, Yelm, WA

Library Journal

★ 02/01/2016
Two sisters—Dionne, 16, and Phaedra, 11—are suddenly shipped off from Brooklyn to Barbados by their mother in the summer of 1989 to live with their grandmother, a midwife and practitioner of obeah, because their mother can no longer take care of them. The siblings struggle to find their places at Hyacinth's home in Bird Hill: Dionne longs to fall in love and return to New York; Phaedra immerses herself in her grandmother's practice. They discover family secrets and are confronted with their long-absent father, who comes to reclaim them. Soon, the sisters have to choose between familiar Brooklyn and the island. In this lyrical debut, the two protagonists come of age against the backdrop of the sumptuous and vibrant Bird Hill, Barbados. Woven throughout are tender moments of love and loss, along with deep issues such as mental illness, sexuality, and betrayal. The protagonists are multilayered and nuanced, and the island becomes a character in itself. Equally heartbreaking and triumphant, this narrative is filled with the pain and hope of growing up. VERDICT Unforgettable characters, a lush setting, and family drama will keep teens reading this deft and stunning work.—Shelley Diaz, School Library Journal

School Library Journal

With a voice that can shift from the liquid brown sugar of Barbados to Brooklyn’s assertive nasal tones, Robin Miles offers a pitch-perfect reading of Naomi Jackson’s remarkable first novel. The affecting coming-of-age story introduces us to 16-year-old Dionne and 10-year-old Phaedra in the summer of 1989. When their mother isn’t able to care for them back home in Brooklyn, the girls are sent to their grandmother in Barbados. Miles uses a slight change of pace to signal the scenes of memory set in Brooklyn. And she handles shifts in perspective and tone beautifully—exuberant young Phaedra, self-conscious teen Dionne, and world-wise grandmother, as well as offering believable sound portraits of the men in their lives. What a pleasure. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

2015-04-15
Sixteen-year-old Dionne Braithwaite and her 10-year-old sister, Phaedra, are sent to the tiny town of St. John, Barbados, to stay with their grandmother while their mother, Avril, recovers from a long depression. Avril, a nurse, has been overwhelmed with sadness after witnessing the deaths of her patients to AIDS following the sudden disappearance of her abusive husband, Errol. With Avril unable to take care of her family, it was Dionne who took on the responsibility of caring for her mother and her little sister. But in her grandmother's house in Barbados, Dionne doesn't need to take care of anyone but herself—and she finds it unnerving. Phaedra, however, fits right in—to her, Barbados feels like the home Brooklyn never was—and she gleefully absorbs the stories of her mother's people. The mystery of what happened to Avril to weight her life with such sadness fuels the book, becoming the driving force behind Dionne's desire to discover the pieces of Avril left behind in her old Barbados bedroom. But as Avril delays returning to take the girls back to Brooklyn, Dionne begins to act out and make unwise relationship decisions, leading her grandmother to believe she's on her way to becoming the kind of "easy" girl who lets herself be used by men. What Dionne's grandmother doesn't realize is that the one thing Dionne had learned from watching Avril was "that if you wanted to keep a man, he should love you at least a little bit more than you loved him"—one of many moments of awareness that permeate this delightful debut novel. An engrossing and poignant coming-of-age story populated with engaging, well-drawn characters.

Kirkus Reviews