Amazon.com Review
In this tough Caribbean tale, Cyan Cattlewash's world begins to fall apart when she is only a child. Nicknamed Night because she's so dark, Cyan is her father's darling girl. But then her father is executed for murdering a man that his wife had flirted with, and her sister--a bright girl who is sent away to school with every penny the family has saved--dies from a failed abortion.
Cyan ends her turbulent relationship with her mother and lives alone. When she becomes pregnant by the only man she ever loved, she discovers that she can't bear the thought of being a mother, yet is terrorized by the idea of terminating the pregnancy, after what happened to her sister.
Her American friend, Koko, has fled anonymity in the United States for relative fame and admiration among the people of Barbados. Through her remaining ties in the States, Koko arranges for an American woman named Amanda to adopt Cyan's baby. When the baby arrives, Cyan refuses to see her, afraid at some deep level that the baby will take hold of her battered affections, and Amanda makes preparations to leave with her newly adopted daughter. Yet Cyan can't stop thinking about her baby, and her thoughts push her to reenact the violence that she had tried to place behind her. --Susan Swartwout
From Publishers Weekly
For Night, the beleaguered, independent-minded Barbadian heroine of Lovell's highly wrought second novel (after the praised Fire in the Canes), life is a series of no-win scenarios. With her father hanged for murder and her beloved sister dead from a botched abortion, Night (christened Cyan but called Night "'cause I was so dark") suffers the scorn of her native fishing village until her job as a domestic leads to a life-altering friendship with the lady of the house. An artsy, expat African American, Koko is necessarily an ambiguous figure in this novel, which bitterly depicts the quasi-colonial sexual tensions between vacationers and locals. Koko encourages Night to take dressmaking courses and helps her peddle her wares to tourists on the beach. This business soon leads Night into selling her body to tourists, a trade that enriches and demeans her at once. At the same time, Night falls in love with a fellow beach vendor, who leaves Night pregnant when he decamps with a female tourist. Koko arranges for Night to give up the baby for adoption to a wealthy American woman, an act that breeds tragic consequences. After a leisurely development, Lovell concludes his narrative in a frenzied whirlwind of action and melodrama. Despite this imbalance, his ear for the musical cadences of Bajan English and his understanding of Barbadian culture underscore his evocation of an exotic location that seems like paradise but has its own share of human misery.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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