Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon
Levy's follow-up to her novel Small Island,, which won a ton of awards and was one of my favorite books of 2004 (or 2005, I forget), is the story of a young British girl with Jamaican parents who is struggling to find her place in the world, I guess. She has to deal with all sorts of bizarrely casual racism--is England really like that? After a small breakdown, her parents send her to Jamaica, where her aunt tells her all the family stories her mother and father never shared. The protagonist gets totally lost in the second half of the books as these family stories are shoehorned in; we never see her reactions and see very little of her apparently life-changing experiences in Jamaica. The ending feels a little bit like a cop-out too. It's not that this is a bad book--I did read it all today--but it is disappointing. B-.
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