Review by New York Times Review
MONTEGO BAY, the hub of Jamaica's tourist industry, is the setting of "Here Comes the Sun," Nicole Dennis-Benn's first novel. In her opening paragraph, she makes her intention clear: to avert our attention from the opulent hotels to the impoverished neighborhoods of those who depend on tourism for their survival. By day Margot works the front desk at Palm Star Resort. At night "her real work" begins: selling her body to the resort's paying guests. Although economically and socially disadvantaged, Margot is not easily exploited. Dennis-Benn's protagonist is refreshingly brave, clever and ambitious. Margot debases herself to pay for the private education of her younger sister, Thandi. Book-smart and talented, Thandi is the family's only hope of escaping the shabby village of River Bank. As Margot moves between the starkly different worlds of River Bank and the resort, she carries a secret - her love affair with Verdene Moore, a reclusive lesbian whom the people of River Bank view as the Antichrist. Verdene's pink house, "built with real cement," vividly embodies her difference and her vulnerability. Neighbors leave dead animals on her lawn and smear hateful words across her door with animal blood. Margot approaches Verdene's house each night with fear, recalling the brutal killing of other lesbians. Dennis-Benn, born and raised in Jamaica, doesn't exaggerate the threat these lovers face. "Here Comes the Sun" sheds much-needed light on the island's disenfranchised, particularly on the hardships suffered by its L.G.B.T. community. The light radiating from what might otherwise be too bleak a story is Margot's love for her sister. Her hope of providing a better future for Thandi is palpable, an unquenchable fire blazing through the novel, likely to scorch anyone who stands in the way. Thandi herself emerges as a complex, engaging character. In spite of all she has going for her, she lacks self-esteem because she is dark-skinned in a society Dennis-Benn portrays as harrowingly shade-conscious. "Who want to be black like dat in dis place?" asks Miss Ruby, River Bank's unlicensed beautician. Thandi purchases "Queen of Pearl crème," a chemical-ridden bleaching agent, and undergoes Miss Ruby's dangerous skin-lightening procedure, imagining "her blackness peeling off, the hydrogen peroxide Miss Ruby pours into the mixture acting like an abrasive, a medicine for her melancholy." In exposing the flip side of this well-advertised island paradise, Dennis-Benn risks reducing Jamaica's complex society to a false binary - white vs. black, affluent vs. destitute. There are times, too, when inauthentic details undermine the novel's credibility. More than once, Dennis-Benn mentions the "heavy scent of bougainvillea," a gorgeous but essentially odorless flower. And readers familiar with Jamaica will note that the Blue Mountains, located in the east, cannot be seen from any window in Montego Bay. These editorial blind spots, while momentarily disengaging, don't detract from the sincerity of Benn's subject or her skillful handling of the plot. She carefully waits, for instance, to reveal the early trauma that has hardened Margot's heart. HER PROSE IS best when she allows her characters heightened moments of awareness. In a remarkable passage, Margot's mother remembers a bus trip she took to Devon House, the restored great-house of Jamaica's first black millionaire. Something unforeseen happened to her on that trip, and she recalls that on the way back her home looked different: "The sea-green of the nauseating sea, the sneering sun in the wide expanse of a pale sky, the indecisive Y-shaped river that once swallowed her childhood, and even the red dirt from the bauxite mines caked under her worn heels, seemed like a wide-open wound that bled and bled between the rural parishes." Similarly, readers of this important debut will no doubt see Jamaicain anew and different light. MARGARET CEZAIR-THOMPSON is the author of "The True History of Paradise" and "The Pirate's Daughter." She teaches at Wellesley College.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Identity, self-respect, class, social status, same-sex love: these are just some of the topics and themes that Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-based Dennis-Benn addresses in her first novel. Smart and ambitious Margot works at an opulent resort in Montego Bay, but her all-consuming goal in life is to protect her younger sister, Thandi, from the sexual exploitation that she has had to endure to survive. She is determined that Thandi, the family good girl, will get a proper education and be successful, and, indeed, Thandi has spent her entire high-school years preparing for a crucial examination that will determine her future. But Thandi longs to be an artist, and she attempts to bleach her skin to improve her social status: after all, a lighter complexion means a better future, or at least the potential for it. Both sisters have secrets, from each other and from outsiders. Dennis-Benn reveals a sure hand, creating a world she knows well while offering intimate portraits of characters readers will care deeply about, even as their struggles lead to less-than-stellar choices. An impressive debut.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A stormy family lives through Jamaica's early 1990s drought in Dennis-Benn's first novel. Delores sells trinkets at a tourist market; her daughter Margot, whom Delores pimped out when Margot was very young, now works as a front desk clerk at a hotel. Margot turns tricks after hours to make extra money to pay her much younger sister Thandi's tuition at a Catholic school. Margot's romantic yearning is directed towards Verdene, a rich woman considered a witch by their village because she is a lesbian. Thandi, the unhappy recipient of her family's hopes, feverishly tries to bleach her skin white and to resist her attraction to her childhood friend Charles, whose poverty would impede her quest for upward mobility. The novel, with its knife fights and baroque blackmail schemes, often threatens to stray from operatic intensity to soap opera melodrama. But Dennis-Benn redeems it with her striking portrayal of a vibrant community where everyone is related and every action reverberates, and her unstinting description of how shame whips desire into submission. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Set in Montego Bay, Jamaica, this debut novel revolves around Dolores and her two children, Margot and Thandi, revealing the intersection of poverty, race, and sex. Sixteen-year-old Thandi, the focus of her mother's and older sister's hopes for future financial success, studies at a prestigious private high school thanks to Margot's relationship with her boss, the owner of the Palm Star Resort. Margot's job doesn't pay well, so she supplements her income by serving as the hotel's unofficial in-house prostitute. Unaware of her older sister's secret life, Thandi wants to be an artist and freewheeling teenager, not a wealthy doctor and the family's redeemer. As the end of school nears, a new resort hotel threatens the family's home, secrets old and new are uncovered, and family bonds unravel. The descriptions are vivid but not graphic, the language fluid, and the characters well developed. The Jamaican patois used for some of the dialog highlights the class and identity issues that run throughout. Verdict Not for the faint of heart, as the women are often unlikable and their circumstances dire, but readers and book clubs interested in complicated characters and challenging themes will appreciate this first novel. [See Prepub Alert, 1/11/16.]-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The lives of three generations of women in Jamaica intersect as they try to build better lives. Margot, a 30-year-old desk clerk at a hotel in Jamaica, has fallen into a side business of sex with the white men who visit the island looking for poor women to exploit. This, of course, is not the life Margot wants. She only does it to support her younger sister, Thandi, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who's destined to be successful and "make everything better" for the family. Thandi, however, is more interested in being thought beautiful and the type of success that goes along with that, spending her extra money on skin-lightening creams to turn her dark skin whiter. Thandi's and Margot's tales intertwine with the story of their abusive mother, Delores, and the rest of their poverty-stricken community, set against the backdrop of wealthy white tourists. Margot finds a temporary refuge from the constant barrage of work and men in her romantic relationship with a local woman named Verdene, but she can't escape the fear of violence that same-sex couples in their society face. And, as past secrets come to a head, the poor black and wealthy white worlds of Jamaica collide. This debut novel from Dennis-Benn is an astute social commentary on the intricacies of race, gender, wealth inequality, colorism, and tourism. But these themes rise organically from the narrative rather than overwhelming it. Here are visceral, profound writing and invigorating characters. Here, too, is the deep and specific sensation of experience. Consider teenage Thandi's first awareness of being watched by the boy she likes: "a pulse stirs between her legs and she hurries down the path, holding it in like pee."Haunting and superbly crafted, this is a magical book from a writer of immense talent and intelligence. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
