Patsy

Author of the multi-best-booked, Lambda-graced, NYPL Young Lions finalist Here Comes the Sun, Dennis-Benn boldly crafts the story of a Jamaican woman named Patsy who joins oldest friend and secretly beloved Cicely in America while leaving behind both mother and daughter. With a seven-city tour.

April 1, 2019
A woman comes to terms with how her immigration to America affects her family back home in Jamaica--and 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 York--despite Patsy's best efforts, the only employment she can find is as a bathroom attendant, cleaning toilets--and 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 here--even when they're flawed or unlikable--inspire 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.

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April 8, 2019
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.

Starred review from April 15, 2019
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)