Here Comes the Sun

May 2, 2016
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.

June 15, 2016

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

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