My second read for #blacklitchallenge & Black History Month. Listen, I bought this book years ago reflexively, automatically, because I have loved Kincaid so dearly. Ever since college, reading “Girl” and Annie John... But then I took this home and I looked up the reviews for this book and they were... not great. So I still meant to read it, but they took the wind out of my sails and this book languished on my shelves for an age. . . Listen, the reviews aren’t always right. I LOVED this book. Not right from the beginning, I will admit. Kincaid uses a run-on style here. Not exactly run on sentences but run-on paragraphs, run-on thoughts, everything bleeds into everything else just like now bleeds into then and then into now. It took me a little bit to fall into the rhythm of it. But then I found myself repeatedly smiling these smiles of pure joy, not because of anything joyous happening in the book, but just because of the WRITING. This is a story of a specific place and a specific family but she also deliberately unmoors it over and over again with allusions to Greek myth and to archetypes and to geology and immigration stories. But it is also her story, and anyone has read *any* of Kincaid’s other work will recognize connections here. Mr. Sweet is often unbearable in his self-absorbed ways, but Kincaid basically (but never explicitly) turns him into Zeus, and I’m like, OKAY, he’s Zeus, and Zeus is a prick, GOT IT. And it somehow made it easier to bear. . . Anyway, this book is about the dissolution of a marriage and it is about racism and classism and archetypes of creative geniuses and small New England towns and small Caribbean islands and recovering from the wounds of childhood and the way our nows are rooted in our thens and our thens rooted in our nows. . . I loved it, I loved it. Five stars. . . #seenowthen #jamaicakincaid #blackstorieshavepower #bookreview https://www.instagram.com/p/B8ZQ3chAcDN/?igshid=1raat5azxjtbx
