Review by New York Times Review
PATSY, by Nicole Dennis-Benn. (Liveright, $26.95.) The title character of Dennis-Benn's second novel leaves her young daughter behind in Jamaica when she comes to America as an undocumented immigrant to reconnect with a female lover. The book avoids cliché, finding ample pleasure with the pain and sacrifice. A GOOD AMERICAN FAMILY: The Red Scare and My Father, by David Maraniss. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) With poignant honesty, Maraniss, a skilled biographer and historian, scrutinizes the life of his father, a communist sympathizer who was subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee, harassed by the F.B.I. and blacklisted in his career as a newspaperman. THE MAKING OF A JUSTICE: Reflections on My First 94 Years, by John Paul Stevens. (Little, Brown, $35.) The 99-year-old Stevens looks back on his 35 years as a justice on the Supreme Court, reflecting on cases in which he played a key role and also on larger themes like the shape of American democracy. CLYDE FANS: A Picture Novel, by Seth. (Drawn & Quarterly, $54.95.) Twenty years in the making, this substantial graphic novel tells a multi-generational story of a family-owned electrical fan business in Toronto - the ups and downs of livelihoods tied to sales and fathers and sons who grapple with changing times. MRS. EVERYTHING, by Jennifer Weiner. (Atria, $28.) Balancing her signature wit with a political voice that's new to her fiction, Weiner tells the story of the women's movement through the lives of two sisters raised in 1950s Detroit. The book holds up the prism of choice and lets light shine through from every angle. DEAF REPUBLIC: Poems, by Ilya Kaminsky. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) This extraordinary poetry collection is structured as a two-act play, in which an occupying army kills a deaf boy and villagers respond by marshaling a wall of silence as a source of resistance. "Our hearing doesn't weaken," one poem declares, "but something silent in us strengthens." THE LAND OF FLICKERING LIGHTS: Restoring America in an Age of Broken Politics, by Michael Bennet. (Atlantic Monthly, $27.) The Colorado senator and Democratic presidential candidate presents his views, based on personal experience, of the partisan stalemate in Washington and how to overcome it. RUNNING TO THE EDGE: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed, by Matthew Futterman. (Doubleday, $28.95.) A deputy sports editor at The Times profiles the coach who helped make American distance runners a threat. THE THIRTY-YEAR GENOCIDE: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, by Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi. (Harvard, $35.) This study ventures beyond the well-known Armenian death marches to attacks on other minorities as well. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
When Patsy finally gets a U.S. travel visa in 1998, she is so sure that she is neither a good mother nor capable of becoming one that she plans to leave her young daughter, Tru, behind in Jamaica and never look back. There's something pulling Patsy, too, the promise of reunion with her girlhood best friend turned lover, Cicely, who left Jamaica a decade ago. But things quickly fall apart when Patsy arrives in Brooklyn to a less-welcoming situation than Cicely suggested in her letters. As Patsy survives the mind-numbing terror of undocumented life, stories from her past seep in to reveal her familiarity with hardship and a well of strength that is nonetheless invisible to her. Meanwhile, Tru deals with her own terror, suffering from her mother's abandonment while living with her father and his family, strangers to her at first. Ten years later, stoic teen Tru is almost undone by the loneliness of her gnawing depression and feelings of queerness, unaware that her mother, now a Manhattan nanny, shares both. Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun, 2016) builds big worlds inside and outside of her touchable characters, writing through their knotty love in all its failures and mercies in this empathic intergenerational epic of womanhood and inheritance.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A Jamaican woman abandons her daughter for a chance to reunite with her childhood friend turned lover in this wrenching second novel from Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun). Adoring letters from Cicely, who left several years earlier, inspire Patsy to emigrate from Jamaica to America, but when she arrives in New York in 1998, her dreams of a romantic reunion are dashed by the discovery that Cicely has married an abusive husband. Forced to set out on her own, Patsy finds work as a bathroom attendant and a nanny. Meanwhile, Tru, her six-year-old daughter, is still in Jamaica under the care of her father, who helps to ease the girl's devastation by teaching her to play soccer, a game she excels at. Though Patsy has decided that "the absence of a mother is more dignified than the presence of a distant one," as she settles into a sustainable life over the next decade, Tru struggles with depression and self-harm. Patsy's ambivalence about motherhood transforms this otherwise familiar immigrant narrative into an immersive study in unintended consequences, where even the push Patsy's new girlfriend gives her to try and make amends, by sending a gift to Tru, leads to disaster. Out of that debacle, though, a chance for rapprochement appears, one that sets the stage for Tru to turn her athletic talent into the kind of life her mother is still grasping at. This is a marvelous novel. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Redemptive parallel stories examine themes of identity, belonging, and self-fulfillment in Dennis-Benn's (Here Comes the Sun) latest. Patsy feels her dreams were deferred by early motherhood, so she leaves her five-year-old daughter Tru with the girl's father in Jamaica and comes to America with no intention to return. Patsy's intent is to reconnect with her best friend and lover, Cicely, who immigrated earlier. Upon arrival, Patsy soon realizes Cicely's supposed "marriage of convenience" is complicated. Cicely doesn't want to leave her husband and son. Patsy, undocumented, ends up raising other people's children while, consumed by guilt, she has no contact with her own daughter. At the same time, Tru is growing up within a family she hardly knows. She battles depression and feelings of not belonging while navigating her queer identity. Her entire life is overshadowed by her absent mother. Tru turns to self-harm to survive emotionally, but she is gifted athletically and her father, Roy, bonds with her by teaching her to play soccer. In the climax of the story, Patsy and Tru's stories intersect in dramatic fashion while leaving room for healing. VERDICT 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.--Judy Murray, Monroe Cty. Lib. Syst., Temperance, MI
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman comes to terms with how her immigration to America affects her family back home in Jamaicaand herself.For the follow-up to her highly acclaimed debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (2016), Dennis-Benn returns briefly to Jamaica before shifting her locale to Brooklyn. It's 1998, and single mother Patsy isn't able to get a tourist visa at the American Embassy in Kingston until she agrees to leave Trudy-Ann, her 5-year-old daughter, behind. Patsy's American dreams are not just about a better financial future for Tru; she has long hoped to reunite with the love of her life, her childhood girlfriend, Cicely, now living in Brooklyn. But her dreams are stymied by the difficult reality of finding work in New Yorkdespite Patsy's best efforts, the only employment she can find is as a bathroom attendant, cleaning toiletsand by Cicely's marriage to an abusive, overbearing man. Cicely, now a woman "smelling of expensive flowers and looking resplendent in a long purple peacoat cinched at the waist with a belt, a colorful silk scarf wrapped around her neck, still holding on to her Chanel handbag," would rather stay with her husband than lose the lifestyle his wealth provides her. Tru, meanwhile, is sent to live with the father she doesn't know. Alternating between Patsy's and Tru's stories, Dennis-Benn allows each character's experience an equal depth and presence in the book. Slowly Patsy comes into her own, finding work as a nanny, but as Tru comes of age back in Jamaica missing her mother, Patsy, looking after another woman's child, is haunted by the absence of her own daughter and the choices she must continue to make to survive in America, alone. Although she's lovingly drawn by Dennis-Benn, Patsy has done the single most-damning thing a mother can do in our society: She has abandoned her child. It's a marker of Dennis-Benn's masterful prowess at characterization and her elegant, nuanced writing that the people hereeven when they're flawed or unlikableinspire sympathy and respect.Dennis-Benn has written a profound book about sexuality, gender, race, and immigration that speaks to the contemporary moment through the figure of a woman alive with passion and regret. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
