Patsy

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.

It's tough to imagine anyone other than Sharon Gordon narrating this culture-rich novel about a Jamaican immigrant living in New York City. Gordon's portrayal of a variety of Jamaican voices--from softly melodic Jamaican-American dialect to hearty Kingston street patois--keeps this performance soaring despite the hardships of the characters. Longing for a better life, as well as a rekindled relationship with her childhood friend who married an American, Patsy trades her Jamaican ghetto for New York City. Gordon's precisely articulated English captures Patsy's difficulties as an undocumented immigrant who struggles to make a living and become Americanized. The story's greatest heartache involves Patsy's daughter, whom she abandoned at age 5, as she struggles to find her identity back in Jamaica. N.M.C. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine