Customer Reviews

Black Marks

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Kirsten Hoyte has got to be the world's most talented writer to have me relate to her tale of growing up between all kinds of worlds I know nothing about! Then again, I can't think of any young woman who doesn't need to discover who she is in light of everything that went into making her that way, and to find some sort of comfort and/or strength in that.

The main character, Georgette Collins, comes across as likable, even though she is scarcely able to present much of herself or to put her best foot forward, not remembering her past and therefore, not really knowing who she is now. I think that one way Ms. Hoyte manages to do this is by understating Georgie's dark, disturbing behaviors. While you know that she's mutilating herself, drinking too much and indulging in risky activites, it's not so much the focus of the story that you can't put it all aside to get the point--that Georgie needs help and she's going to have to get it for herself. In the struggle to find her name--her power--and recover her past, Georgie and her story become likable and relatable.

I also liked the way the story is told, all jumbled, fragmented and filled in, like Georgie's memories. Goes to show that things don't always have to function in a linear fashion in order to function. The story moves along just fine, and life goes on.

"Black Marks" is literature. A superb first effort! I look forward to more from Ms. Hoyte, and I hope she doesn't keep us waiting.

This exceptional book is well-written with excellent character development. In addition, the unusual plot puts it in the "I couldn't put it down" category. kirsten's observations and insights relating to the culture of the black race in Boston and Jamaica and London's off-beat night life are detailed and profound and will interest any reader. I highly recommend it.

The narrative style was very creative in this work. The author pushes the reader back and forth through time and centers different sections of the book around Georgette Collins giving her impressions and interactions with important people in her life from grandmother, lover, fiance to father.
The character's life is filled with love, excitement, passion, anger and boredom and all of this is painted with powerful description and dialogue. She cover's many social, political, racial and economic ideas, but not in a preachy way; the main character is multi-dimensional. She is an emotional woman with strong insight, intelligent and sensitive; her pain, sorrow and anger are profound and realistically porttrayed.
The ending left me satisfied and gave me an epiphany about what the character was trying to learn about herself by tracing through her life.

Kirsten Hoyte's debut novel is a truly moving, beautiful book. It demands that we as readers question who we are and the assumptions we make about our own lives as well as the lives of others. We find ourselves drawn, along with the heroine, into a not always comfortable sense of dislocation. What makes the feeling tolerable and even instructive is the wonderful way Hoyte has with words, her ability to evoke whole worlds that may be entirely foreign to us. Though the novel leaves much unresolved and, of course, open to interpretation, by the end the haunting sense of dislocation shifts and the world seems to open up in a new way. Now the only question is: When is her next book coming out?