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Irish Times
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
American Dirt author, Jeanine Cummins, returns with a magnificent tale of family, love and loyalty
Speak to Me of Home Author : Jeanine Cummins ISBN-13 : 9781472288806 Publisher : Tinder Press Guideline Price : £20 The once venerable industry of publishing has not covered itself in glory in recent years with many writers finding their reputations tarnished or careers destroyed by activists who place ideology over art. Jeanine Cummins was one of the most high-profile victims of these witch-hunts when her novel, American Dirt , was published in 2020. Following the journey of a Mexican woman fleeing to the United States in fear of her life, the book was initially lauded before questions were raised about its authenticity. In one of the worst examples of literary bullying I've ever witnessed, 142 writers signed a letter to Oprah Winfrey demanding its removal from her book club, while making it fawningly clear they did not blame the host and still held her in the highest possible regard. A weaker person might not have survived such a public mauling, but Cummins is clearly made of strong stuff and returns in triumph with her fourth novel, Speak to Me of Home, whose central character's name – Rafaela Acuña y Daubón – will doubtless infuriate the scolds. READ MORE Set across three generations of a Puerto Rican family, the novel opens with a storm that leads to 22-year-old Daisy being knocked off her bicycle and landing in hospital in a coma. From here, we explore the two maternal figures that preceded her: her mother Ruth and her grandmother Rafaela. [ American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins' book tour cancelled after threats Opens in new window ] Much of the novel is constructed around women either leaving, missing or returning to Puerto Rico. Rafaela is the first to be exiled, when a financial scandal leaves her family no longer able to afford their privileged lifestyle. At home she had fallen for their maid's son, Candido, but in her new life she chooses a clean-cut Irish-American, leading to a marriage with its share of troubles, not least because of an unforgivable act this otherwise decent man commits at a country club. Mirroring this, Ruth, their eldest daughter, eventually finds herself also choosing between two suitors and wondering whether she made the right choice. As the second generation is mixed-race, there's a constant sense of being outsiders. Rafaela experiences racism when she arrives in the US because she's not white enough while, ironically, 20 years later, Ruth is effectively rejected from a Puerto Rican society in college because she's too white. Racial purity, it seems, matters to everyone, no matter which side of the divide you're on. This is a novel rich with story and family history. A genealogy map at the start is unnecessary as Cummins creates such singular identities that one never forgets who's who. Added to that is her skill at character development. Rafaela is likeable when she's young, becomes a virago in adulthood, and is a total hoot in old age, playing video games, going on dates and making inappropriate remarks. She's a deliberate antecedent to her grandson Carlos, the sort of gay teen who listens to the conversation around him but remains silent, before offering a hilarious remark that reduces everyone to laughter. [ American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: 'I felt like the entire world was against me but I knew I would emerge' Opens in new window ] Loyalty and love are important throughout. Family members might snap or argue, but there's no doubting they would throw themselves in front of a train for each other, even those from whom they've long been divorced, which is why the storm that prevents them from immediately gathering by Daisy's bedside is so hard for them to bear. There's a line at the end of Stephen Frears' movie The Queen, where Elizabeth II, still bristling from her treatment during that fateful week in 1997, tells her prime minister: 'You saw all those headlines and you thought, one day this might happen to me. And it will, Mr Blair. Quite suddenly and without warning.' He stares at her in utter disbelief, convinced a person as virtuous as he could never meet such a fate. And look how that turned out. Should the 142 people who signed that reprehensible letter to Oprah read this novel, they might recognise Cummins's skill and empathy, and reflect upon the late queen's imagined words when they next fire arrows in the direction of a fellow writer. After all, if their moment of literary opprobrium ever comes – and it will, quite suddenly and without warning – they might hope their peers would rise to their defence instead of seeing a colleague's distress as an opportunity to express their moral superiority. I don't know whether Cummins is from Puerto Rico, has ever visited Puerto Rico, or could even pick out Puerto Rico on a map. Nor do I care. She's a novelist, a job that involves using one's imagination to invent lives different from one's own, and making the reader believe in and care about them. She achieves that goal magnificently here.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Looking for a new book? Here are 10 new titles
This week's reviews include historical fiction about Florence Nightingale, a love letter to letter-writing, a stirring take on growing wiser and tales of Indigenous women trailblazers. FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Stories for Mothers and Daughters ed. Molly Thatcher British Library, $22.99 This collection of tales from the British Library focuses on mothers and daughters through the 20th century and includes contributions from masters of the form, including A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson and Jamaica Kincaid. There's an awful lot of tea in this book, though the prim confines of a particular kind of British femininity provoke moments of tiny rebellion that snowball, as the anthology proceeds, into open revolt. In Psalms, Winterson goes down the rabbit hole of a daughter's recollections of her devoutly religious mother – describing the death of a pet tortoise with darkly subversive wit. Byatt's intergenerational Rose-Coloured Teacups is a sly, vividly rendered portrayal of the necessity of breaking tradition as well as transmitting it, with shattered artefacts passed down the maternal line and tart one-liners such as: 'She was overdoing the pink.' Kincaid's My Mother departs most from a naturalistic mode, utilising surrealism and fantastical metamorphosis to capture the evolution of the mother-daughter relationship at its core. Changing expectations of motherhood and new freedoms won by feminism permeate these stylish short stories from celebrated literary women. Jeanine Cummins Tinder Press, $32.99 Controversy over 'authenticity' attended the publication of Jeanine Cummins' 2020 novel American Dirt, a tale of Mexican immigrants fleeing narco-traffickers. The author herself was neither Mexican nor an immigrant, though she did have a Puerto Rican grandmother – a fact revealed in the febrile debate over ethnicity, and its fictional representation, that ensued. Despite outrage from some quarters, Oprah refused to pull the book from her book club. It became a bestseller. The fallout does seem to have influenced Cummins' follow-up, Speak to Me of Home, which introduces a fictional Irish-Puerto Rican family resembling the author's own. For matriarch Rafaela, her memory might be going, but she still has vivid recollections of childhood in sun-drenched San Juan. Her daughter Ruth lives in New York and has long navigated ambivalence about her mixed ancestry, while her daughter Daisy strives to reconnect with her heritage, returning to Puerto Rico, where she suffers a misfortune that causes sudden amnesia. Cummins' novel is a riposte to her critics and a family saga that ripples with the complexities of ethnic identity across three generations. Florence Nightingale observes boys tormenting an owl near the Parthenon – and wonders how to tell the story of it – at the start of Laura Elvery's historical novel about the world's most famous nurse. It's a book that ripples with violence even at a structural level, the narrative splintering across Nightingale's long life like shrapnel. She receives a visitor in her old age – Silas Bradley, who claims to have met her 55 years before. A young nurse under her charge, Jean Frawley, holds the key to the connection, and it is through her we view Nightingale overseeing care at a military hospital during the Crimean War. In the aftermath of it, Nightingale became a public figure, blamed for failures that weren't her fault, perhaps a patriarchal reaction against an ambitious upper-class woman refusing to toe the line in a society that expected people like her to be passive, idle things. Plot isn't the novel's strongest point, but the storytelling doesn't drag, and Elvery's atmospheric attention to detail compensates. Nightingale contains a brisk evocation of war's brutality and monotony and horror, and dwells on the textures of the unglamorous work women undertook to repair what could be repaired and endure the rest. The Correspondent Virginia Evans Michael Joseph, $34.99 Veteran writers of letters to the editor might enjoy this epistolary novel from Virginia Evans, which follows a compulsive letter-writer, Sybil Van Antwerp. As her diverse correspondence reveals, Sybil is a spiky woman now in her seventies, with a tart sense of humour. She's retired as a judge's clerk and has two adult children – a third died in childhood – and her progressive vision impairment threatens to destroy her ability to write as she has always done, as a form of empowerment but also as a shield against the vulnerability of more direct contact. The novel is composed entirely of letters – sent and unsent – to family and associates, to a mysterious figure from her past, and rather wonderfully to famous literary figures such as Joan Didion. Books in this form are rare in modern publishing and tend to focus on adolescence – Sue Townsend's The Diary of Adrian Mole is probably the best known – so it's remarkable that Evans has created such an appealing, flawed, tragicomic character at the other end of life. Writers of all stripes should be attracted by the packaging: the story comes wrapped in a love letter to the art of letter-writing itself. The Listeners Maggie Stiefvater Hachette, $32.99 Set in a high-end hotel in West Virginia during World War II, The Listeners tells a story of luxury and intrigue with a splash of romance and magical realism thrown in. Diplomatic families from Axis powers – Nazis among them – have been detained at the Avallon Hotel, to the discontent of staff. The retreat is overseen by June Hudson, an orphan taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, and the late paterfamilias left her in charge of the business, though his playboy son Edgar owns the place. Jane communes with the magical 'sweetwater' spring upon which the hotel is built, pursues love interests and runs what has essentially become a luxurious internment camp as government agents flit in and out and the motley cast of guests – some clearly evil, some merely unfortunate children – await a political solution that will return them home. This is the debut adult novel from YA bestseller Maggie Stiefvater, and while there are charming elements and cinematic set-pieces, it feels overwhelmed by research at the expense of pace and plot and can be very slow-going. NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK A Wisdom of Age Jacinta Parsons ABC Books, $34.99 The growing trend in books about ageing has been largely driven by Baby Boomers, which is why it's heartening to encounter one from a younger author who wants to learn from the women who go before her. How to defy the negative stereotypes? How to age with joy, grace and courage? How to celebrate the wisdom that accumulated years bestow? 'Ageing is not a malady,' observes Jacinta Parsons. 'It doesn't need to be fixed.' Reframing the accepted narrative of decline, she seeks out those who can teach her about rebellion, about reconnecting with the timeless, ageless aspect of the self, about how to embrace the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In her conversations with women from all over the country, she tells of Deborah who has discovered the transgressive thrill of street art, of Guosheng who, after much pain and loss has become a beacon for younger women, of Liz, who started her comedy career at the age of 93, and of Jean, who appreciates solitude because she's also known loneliness. This stirring book is a reminder that the getting of wisdom is a lifelong project. The Invention of Amsterdam. A History of Europe's Greatest City in Ten Walks Ben Coates Scribe, $29.99 You might want to argue with the superlative in the subtitle, but claims to greatness are always arbitrary. Ben Coates – an Englishman now living in the Netherlands – has a passion for his adopted city tempered by a strong dose of irreverence that makes his city walks fun as well as educative. Take the city's foundational myth about a seasick dog that puked when it made landfall, marking the original locus of Amsterdam. 'An early tribute, perhaps, to all those stag-party tourists who still regularly Jackson Pollock the canal sides after enjoying too many Heinekens.' As he wanders the streets and canals, Coates charts the city's history, from its early marshy days and its rise as a centre of commerce, to its role in the slave trade and the dark period of the Nazi occupation. He walks in Rembrandt's footsteps, has an obligatory joint at a 'coffee shop' and visits the Red-Light District as well as going off the usual tourist track. Travellers who want the complex reality behind the usual guidebook cliches are well-served by this entertaining work. Aboriginal Women By Degrees Edited by Maryann Bin-Sallik UQP, $19.99 Before they went on to tertiary education, the Aboriginal women who tell their stories in this collection already had a rich education in their cultural lore or a sense of rootedness in their extended family and community. But to realise their dreams of becoming teachers, lawyers, social workers and role models, they had to navigate the alien institutional environment of academia. The shock of leaving home and straddling two worlds is a recurring theme. Artist and educator Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, who was born under a tree not far from the Daly River Settlement, came to Melbourne to gain her degree. 'The faces around me were strange and unknown and not always friendly.' But she firmly believed in the importance of a Western education to help Indigenous people manage their own affairs. This is echoed by all the contributors, despite the struggles they faced, the racism they encountered, the family responsibilities they had to juggle while studying. These stories of Indigenous trailblazers provide a valuable education for us all. It's easy enough to have worthy intentions and take the moral high ground. But Rutger Bregman doesn't have much time for those he calls 'noble losers': people who demand change without practical strategies to implement it. Look at what happened to the Occupy movement, he says. In this handbook for how to become an 'effective idealist', one of his main messages is that you can't afford to be a purist. If hobnobbing with the rich to raise money for a good cause is required, so be it. It's a view that will rile those who believe that structural change and collective action is what's needed. Bregman's focus is, however, on how individuals can make a difference. He's interested in mavericks and change agents with a singular sense of purpose, from abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to civil rights activist Rosa Parks. While Moral Ambition has a fervour typical of the motivational genre, Rutger is not afraid to needle his readers into taking action. Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach & Amanda Doyle Vermillion, $36.99 Whether you agree with the authors' selection of what constitute the 'big questions' in life or not, this collection of inspirational quotes and reflections casts a net wide enough to capture issues that trouble most of us at challenging times in our lives. The emphasis is on the familial, social and cultural forces that shape us and how each person might find their own path through this maze of pressures and expectations. The authors, experts in human behaviour and other well-known contributors such as Jane Fonda and Cheryl Strayed, offer their insights into what has got them through all manner of dark nights of the soul. Interestingly, when addressing the final question, 'What's the point?', Glennon Doyle turns the whole enterprise on its head. It's OK, she concludes, to unfurrow the brow and say 'I don't know'.
The Age
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Looking for a new book? Here are 10 new titles
This week's reviews include historical fiction about Florence Nightingale, a love letter to letter-writing, a stirring take on growing wiser and tales of Indigenous women trailblazers. FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Stories for Mothers and Daughters ed. Molly Thatcher British Library, $22.99 This collection of tales from the British Library focuses on mothers and daughters through the 20th century and includes contributions from masters of the form, including A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson and Jamaica Kincaid. There's an awful lot of tea in this book, though the prim confines of a particular kind of British femininity provoke moments of tiny rebellion that snowball, as the anthology proceeds, into open revolt. In Psalms, Winterson goes down the rabbit hole of a daughter's recollections of her devoutly religious mother – describing the death of a pet tortoise with darkly subversive wit. Byatt's intergenerational Rose-Coloured Teacups is a sly, vividly rendered portrayal of the necessity of breaking tradition as well as transmitting it, with shattered artefacts passed down the maternal line and tart one-liners such as: 'She was overdoing the pink.' Kincaid's My Mother departs most from a naturalistic mode, utilising surrealism and fantastical metamorphosis to capture the evolution of the mother-daughter relationship at its core. Changing expectations of motherhood and new freedoms won by feminism permeate these stylish short stories from celebrated literary women. Jeanine Cummins Tinder Press, $32.99 Controversy over 'authenticity' attended the publication of Jeanine Cummins' 2020 novel American Dirt, a tale of Mexican immigrants fleeing narco-traffickers. The author herself was neither Mexican nor an immigrant, though she did have a Puerto Rican grandmother – a fact revealed in the febrile debate over ethnicity, and its fictional representation, that ensued. Despite outrage from some quarters, Oprah refused to pull the book from her book club. It became a bestseller. The fallout does seem to have influenced Cummins' follow-up, Speak to Me of Home, which introduces a fictional Irish-Puerto Rican family resembling the author's own. For matriarch Rafaela, her memory might be going, but she still has vivid recollections of childhood in sun-drenched San Juan. Her daughter Ruth lives in New York and has long navigated ambivalence about her mixed ancestry, while her daughter Daisy strives to reconnect with her heritage, returning to Puerto Rico, where she suffers a misfortune that causes sudden amnesia. Cummins' novel is a riposte to her critics and a family saga that ripples with the complexities of ethnic identity across three generations. Florence Nightingale observes boys tormenting an owl near the Parthenon – and wonders how to tell the story of it – at the start of Laura Elvery's historical novel about the world's most famous nurse. It's a book that ripples with violence even at a structural level, the narrative splintering across Nightingale's long life like shrapnel. She receives a visitor in her old age – Silas Bradley, who claims to have met her 55 years before. A young nurse under her charge, Jean Frawley, holds the key to the connection, and it is through her we view Nightingale overseeing care at a military hospital during the Crimean War. In the aftermath of it, Nightingale became a public figure, blamed for failures that weren't her fault, perhaps a patriarchal reaction against an ambitious upper-class woman refusing to toe the line in a society that expected people like her to be passive, idle things. Plot isn't the novel's strongest point, but the storytelling doesn't drag, and Elvery's atmospheric attention to detail compensates. Nightingale contains a brisk evocation of war's brutality and monotony and horror, and dwells on the textures of the unglamorous work women undertook to repair what could be repaired and endure the rest. The Correspondent Virginia Evans Michael Joseph, $34.99 Veteran writers of letters to the editor might enjoy this epistolary novel from Virginia Evans, which follows a compulsive letter-writer, Sybil Van Antwerp. As her diverse correspondence reveals, Sybil is a spiky woman now in her seventies, with a tart sense of humour. She's retired as a judge's clerk and has two adult children – a third died in childhood – and her progressive vision impairment threatens to destroy her ability to write as she has always done, as a form of empowerment but also as a shield against the vulnerability of more direct contact. The novel is composed entirely of letters – sent and unsent – to family and associates, to a mysterious figure from her past, and rather wonderfully to famous literary figures such as Joan Didion. Books in this form are rare in modern publishing and tend to focus on adolescence – Sue Townsend's The Diary of Adrian Mole is probably the best known – so it's remarkable that Evans has created such an appealing, flawed, tragicomic character at the other end of life. Writers of all stripes should be attracted by the packaging: the story comes wrapped in a love letter to the art of letter-writing itself. The Listeners Maggie Stiefvater Hachette, $32.99 Set in a high-end hotel in West Virginia during World War II, The Listeners tells a story of luxury and intrigue with a splash of romance and magical realism thrown in. Diplomatic families from Axis powers – Nazis among them – have been detained at the Avallon Hotel, to the discontent of staff. The retreat is overseen by June Hudson, an orphan taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, and the late paterfamilias left her in charge of the business, though his playboy son Edgar owns the place. Jane communes with the magical 'sweetwater' spring upon which the hotel is built, pursues love interests and runs what has essentially become a luxurious internment camp as government agents flit in and out and the motley cast of guests – some clearly evil, some merely unfortunate children – await a political solution that will return them home. This is the debut adult novel from YA bestseller Maggie Stiefvater, and while there are charming elements and cinematic set-pieces, it feels overwhelmed by research at the expense of pace and plot and can be very slow-going. NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK A Wisdom of Age Jacinta Parsons ABC Books, $34.99 The growing trend in books about ageing has been largely driven by Baby Boomers, which is why it's heartening to encounter one from a younger author who wants to learn from the women who go before her. How to defy the negative stereotypes? How to age with joy, grace and courage? How to celebrate the wisdom that accumulated years bestow? 'Ageing is not a malady,' observes Jacinta Parsons. 'It doesn't need to be fixed.' Reframing the accepted narrative of decline, she seeks out those who can teach her about rebellion, about reconnecting with the timeless, ageless aspect of the self, about how to embrace the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In her conversations with women from all over the country, she tells of Deborah who has discovered the transgressive thrill of street art, of Guosheng who, after much pain and loss has become a beacon for younger women, of Liz, who started her comedy career at the age of 93, and of Jean, who appreciates solitude because she's also known loneliness. This stirring book is a reminder that the getting of wisdom is a lifelong project. The Invention of Amsterdam. A History of Europe's Greatest City in Ten Walks Ben Coates Scribe, $29.99 You might want to argue with the superlative in the subtitle, but claims to greatness are always arbitrary. Ben Coates – an Englishman now living in the Netherlands – has a passion for his adopted city tempered by a strong dose of irreverence that makes his city walks fun as well as educative. Take the city's foundational myth about a seasick dog that puked when it made landfall, marking the original locus of Amsterdam. 'An early tribute, perhaps, to all those stag-party tourists who still regularly Jackson Pollock the canal sides after enjoying too many Heinekens.' As he wanders the streets and canals, Coates charts the city's history, from its early marshy days and its rise as a centre of commerce, to its role in the slave trade and the dark period of the Nazi occupation. He walks in Rembrandt's footsteps, has an obligatory joint at a 'coffee shop' and visits the Red-Light District as well as going off the usual tourist track. Travellers who want the complex reality behind the usual guidebook cliches are well-served by this entertaining work. Aboriginal Women By Degrees Edited by Maryann Bin-Sallik UQP, $19.99 Before they went on to tertiary education, the Aboriginal women who tell their stories in this collection already had a rich education in their cultural lore or a sense of rootedness in their extended family and community. But to realise their dreams of becoming teachers, lawyers, social workers and role models, they had to navigate the alien institutional environment of academia. The shock of leaving home and straddling two worlds is a recurring theme. Artist and educator Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, who was born under a tree not far from the Daly River Settlement, came to Melbourne to gain her degree. 'The faces around me were strange and unknown and not always friendly.' But she firmly believed in the importance of a Western education to help Indigenous people manage their own affairs. This is echoed by all the contributors, despite the struggles they faced, the racism they encountered, the family responsibilities they had to juggle while studying. These stories of Indigenous trailblazers provide a valuable education for us all. It's easy enough to have worthy intentions and take the moral high ground. But Rutger Bregman doesn't have much time for those he calls 'noble losers': people who demand change without practical strategies to implement it. Look at what happened to the Occupy movement, he says. In this handbook for how to become an 'effective idealist', one of his main messages is that you can't afford to be a purist. If hobnobbing with the rich to raise money for a good cause is required, so be it. It's a view that will rile those who believe that structural change and collective action is what's needed. Bregman's focus is, however, on how individuals can make a difference. He's interested in mavericks and change agents with a singular sense of purpose, from abolitionist Thomas Clarkson to civil rights activist Rosa Parks. While Moral Ambition has a fervour typical of the motivational genre, Rutger is not afraid to needle his readers into taking action. Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach & Amanda Doyle Vermillion, $36.99 Whether you agree with the authors' selection of what constitute the 'big questions' in life or not, this collection of inspirational quotes and reflections casts a net wide enough to capture issues that trouble most of us at challenging times in our lives. The emphasis is on the familial, social and cultural forces that shape us and how each person might find their own path through this maze of pressures and expectations. The authors, experts in human behaviour and other well-known contributors such as Jane Fonda and Cheryl Strayed, offer their insights into what has got them through all manner of dark nights of the soul. Interestingly, when addressing the final question, 'What's the point?', Glennon Doyle turns the whole enterprise on its head. It's OK, she concludes, to unfurrow the brow and say 'I don't know'.
Irish Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal: Navigating the ups and downs of life
The Best of Everything Author : Kit de Waal ISBN-13 : 978-1035404797 Publisher : Tinder Press Guideline Price : £20 The epigraph to Kit de Waal's The Best of Everything is drawn from JM Barrie's Peter Pan: 'Try to be a little kinder than is necessary.' Good advice, surely, but difficult to follow at the best of times, let alone to apply towards those whom you hold responsible for personal tragedy. That de Waal's protagonist returns again and again to this philosophy – sometimes in spite of quite understandable resentment and despair – is a minor miracle of empathy. This character, Paulette, is a young St Kittitian working as an auxiliary nurse in 1970s England. She has a man whom she loves, as well as dreamy soft-focus expectations for her future – a wedding! A honeymoon! A house! – all of which come crashing down in the opening pages of this deceptively engaging and engrossing novel. Because Denton, Paulette's evasive boyfriend, will never be coming home. In his place, his best friend finds his way into a distraught Paulette's bed, and a baby soon follows. As does another child, a white boy from a neighbouring street who has an unexpected connection to Denton's fate (in a clever touch, Paulette's son ends up nicknamed Bird but in actuality it is this other boy, Nellie, who is very much the cuckoo in the nest). Yet any hint of soap opera which such a sketch might suggest is offset by de Waal's exceptionally controlled writing style. Indeed, her prose is practically invisible with little in the way of formal indulgences or flashy fireworks on display (something which mischievously undercuts Paulette's page one desire to see 'rockets and Catherine wheels'). One would be forgiven for interpreting this simplicity – which is actually very hard to achieve – as meaning the novel sits more towards the commercial rather than the literary end of the spectrum. However, this would be a mistake. The craft here is undeniable, clearly visible not just in the subtle evolution of characters such as Bird and Nellie, but in how de Waal manipulates the passage of time across scenes and decades alike (admittedly some of the flashbacks to St Kitts feel a little rough-edged, but her use of forward momentum is a masterclass in showing and telling as appropriate, one from which any author could learn). READ MORE The novel further possesses a steely thematic spine as domestic tableaux are interwoven with the author's characteristic concerns. Among the most recognisable of these are a mixture of Caribbean and Irish immigrant influences, an honest look at race relations in Britain, a commitment to working-class representation, and a knowledgeable perspective on how easily children can fall through the social safety net. De Waal writes authoritatively on all these issues, drawing on both her own upbringing and on her professional background in the Crown Prosecution Service (here one intuits why she was so drawn to the Peter Pan quotation). Nonetheless, her incorporation of such material into The Best of Everything is always through Paulette's eyes and, consequently, it all feels alive rather than merely didactic. Aiding this, and further grounding the novel in its historical moment, is de Waal's three-dimensional depiction of a Black woman's experience of '70s and later '80s England, with Paulette striving to maintain a fraying link to her heritage (symbolised by memories of her grandmother) while also keeping one eye on the tenuousness of her family's future. It is a delicate balance, one imperilled by the exhausting need to perform in non-threatening ways in order to navigate the racist landmines of white society ('Try to be a little kinder than is necessary' takes on additional and more defensive connotations in this light). [ The Celts: A Modern History by Ian Stewart - an extensive work overlooking several essential studies Opens in new window ] Yet while she carries more than her fair share of familial and social burdens, Paulette is neither a saint nor a saviour. She is too real for that. If anything, she possesses something of a self-destructive streak and makes bad decisions on more than one occasion, at times wallowing – often quite realistically – in despair and obsessive behaviour. That said, the character also rallies repeatedly against these slings and arrows in a manner which makes The Best of Everything a very satisfying read. Because de Waal is too astute a writer to deliver just misery fiction; no, this is realism in the truest sense, with both disappointments and promises alike reshaping Paulette's life in unexpected ways. The result is a carefully paced story of a woman facing a myriad of challenges in order to tenaciously carve out space for herself and her unexpected family. One is inclined to cheer her on throughout.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal review – a warm story of second starts
Paulette, the protagonist of Kit de Waal's latest novel, isn't perfect: she can be judgmental and stubborn; she often speaks sharply; and she probably drinks too much Appleton rum. But De Waal's candid narration makes it difficult not to love her. The Best of Everything is the Birmingham-born author's sixth book and her first novel for adults since 2018's The Trick to Time. She made her name with her 2016 debut, My Name Is Leon, which established her as a writer full of heart. We meet Paulette, who came to Britain from St Kitts as a child, when she is 29. It's the 1970s and she is an auxiliary nurse. For work she wears 'shoes so sensible they could pass A-level maths'. At home she's desperately in love with Denton, whose 'smell is pure man – sweat, soap and sex'. That's until the worst happens: he is killed in a car crash. Worse still, after his death Paulette learns he has a wife and children he hadn't told her about. All of this happens disconcertingly rapidly, at the beginning. Then, within a page, Paulette is living with Denton's best friend, with whom she has a son called Bird. This is the backdrop to the core relationships Paulette forms in this tale: with Frank, the man who killed Denton in the crash, and Frank's grandson, Nellie, who is about Bird's age and doesn't have a mother of his own. De Waal's tone is warm and wise. She has a knack for the small charming moment, such as when Frank and Nellie arrive late for Christmas dinner at Paulette's. When she opens the door, Frank is wearing oven gloves and holding out a cake tin, which he quickly withdraws. 'Rather too hot at the moment,' he says. 'We had to wait for it to be cooked. We timed it but may have been somewhat over-optimistic.' It's equal parts sitcom material and – when you know that this tie-wearing old man is single-handedly bringing up his grandchild – also devastating. De Waal is funny too, especially when she inhabits Paulette's consciousness and her character's Caribbean inflections become more pronounced. When her friends try to console her after Denton's death, we get: 'Them with their side-eye. Them with their cleverness … how two and two always makes four but Paulette can't count.' You can just see her rolling her eyes. Paulette's tenderness towards Frank and Nellie feels unrealistic at first, while her outbursts elsewhere seem unjustified. But, as she eases herself out of her protective shell, we come to learn that this is a book about forgiveness. And by seeing De Waal's protagonist change some of her ways, we realise that we shouldn't have been so quick to judge her either. The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal is published by Tinder Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
