Book Review: How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

Shelly's Book Corner received a review copy from Amazon Vine and voluntarily provided an honest review. This does not affect the opinion of the book or the content of the review.

Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.

In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital.

Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors.

Review

This was my first time reading this author and I enjoyed this collection of short stories. Some stories I enjoyed more than others and I gave a star rating for each short story below.

Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowland’s
4 stars

Mash Up Love
3 stars

Slack
4 stars
Sad but good story.

Bad Behavior
3 stars

Island
3.5 stars

Mermaid River
4 stars

The Ghost of Jia Yi
3.5

How to Love a Jamaican
3 stars

On Shelf
4 stars

We Eat our Daughters
5 stars
This was my favorite short story of the whole book. It spoke about the complexities and differences of mother/daughter relationship in certain cultures.

Shirley From a Small Place
4 stars