The cultural universals of food and love take on subtle hues of meaning in Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of short stories Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. In these half dozen tales of Eastern European immigrants comes a cornucopia of emotion, from the wry and the sad, to the hopeful and the poignant, as each character tries to find a place in this new world. Vapnyar’s immigrants’ hopes and dreams and despairs are framed through the lens of food. In these stories, immigrants become more — or sometimes less — settled as their perspective and proximity to familiar and foreign dishes change, as they settle into new lives while still at times grasping for little bits of home. Vapnyar’s book concludes with recipes annotated with a pleasant but strikingly personal voice that loosely corresponds to the collection of stories.

Lara Vapnyar, author of the novel Memoirs of a Muse and the short story collection There are Jews in My House, has created a compact and emotionally charged collection of work in which the stories are thematically very similar — a tight array focused on identity and community as experienced by immigrants to America. Four of the six stories have been previously published in magazines like Harper’s and The New Yorker; “Puffed Rice and Meatballs” was one of the O. Henry Prize stories in 2006.

In Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, it’s all about assuaging loneliness — physical and emotional — and finding that salve in unexpected places and ways. Vapnyar’s characters strive to be happy with their new lives, and end up with consolations far from what they originally had in mind. For example, in “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf,” Nina finally gets to the cook the vegetable that she so faithfully and optimistically buys every Saturday, only to let it lay forgotten in her refrigerator; however, it isn’t a dish for her husband. In “Borscht,” Sergey goes off in search of a touch of home, but finds it in the culinary rather than coital experience he expects. Luda and Milena, the eponymous pair in “Luda and Milena,” are dueling students in an English class for adults, who vie for the attention of the same man, with a result that is opposite — and catastrophic — from their original hopes and intentions.

The dominance of food as a theme is an effective entry point for the reader, as just about everyone can relate to these experiences. Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love swings from a familiar dish being reminiscent of home, to the discomfort of trying to order something unpronounceable from a menu, from the fluidity of a recipe passed on from family to family, to the competitive streak that can ignite between one cook and another. Vapnyar’s short stories allow for a peek into the hidden lives, the secret desires and regrets, and the expression or repression of the same, in everyday people.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Reconciling the chasm between identity and action in the context of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War is the tight focus of Janis Hallowell’s new book She Was.

Thirty-five years ago, Lucy Johansson was a Kansas-raised young adult living in California. She believed the war in Vietnam was wrong and actively pursued nonviolent protest with fellow students. When the group decided to take its resistance a step further and target buildings after hours, Lucy joined an effort to detonate an explosion at New York City’s Columbia University. Despite her diligence in making sure no one would be harmed by the bomb, there was someone in the building after hours, and Lucy’s offense suddenly bloomed into murder charges.

Fearful and alone, Lucy decided to go underground along with her Vietnam vet brother, who provided food, shelter, and support, thereby sealing his own fate irretrievably with hers. They each took up new identities and new lives. Lucy became “Doreen,” attended dental school, married, and had a child.

But now Doreen’s days on the run are numbered. A fellow student radical has set her sights on her, hoping to trade what she knows about Doreen — one of the last ’70s student radicals still in hiding — to mitigate her own husband’s jail sentence. As the FBI closes in over the course of a week, Doreen realizes her days as a suburban wife, mother, professional, and community volunteer may be over. It’s time to tell her husband and son the truth about who she was.

Woven within Hallowell’s book are several critical subplots, each of which adds to the prism through which the reader is invited to view Doreen.

Her beloved brother Adam, who gave up everything in support of his on-the-lam sister, is haunted by his own memories of service in Vietnam and his life thereafter: from atrocities to lost friends and his father’s high expectations on “being a man,” to enduring the first wave of the AIDS crisis, only to be felled by multiple sclerosis (MS) years later.

Doreen’s family — husband Miles and son Ian — know nothing of her activities in the 1970s and her fugitive status, and find it difficult to judge her for things she did before she was part of their lives. Brief appearances by a couple of Doreen’s fellow radicals illuminate some of the influences that had been at work in persuading Lucy’s involvement with the group. Doreen’s mother, who’s never forgiven her daughter for causing her to lose a son, makes her own judgments crystal clear regarding her daughter and what she’s done.

These perspectives are helpful in developing Doreen as a fully realized character while continuing to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on what Doreen would like to believe about her being a fugitive from the law: that more than three decades of good citizenship somehow mitigates her role in the death of one person at the hands of another.

To her credit, Hallowell’s examination of the roots of identity teases out numerous questions. While she reveals Doreen’s perspective on the idea of identity — that is, will she always be Lucy Johansson, judged by what she did 30 years ago, or can she be Doreen Woods, responsible wife, mother, and upstanding member of her community — at the conclusion of the novel, readers are, for the most part, left to determine for themselves the nature and solidity of an individual’s identity. Through the lens of each character surrounding Doreen, Hallowell weighs whether identity is what is conferred upon a person by others or created by what one becomes through one’s actions, and whether identity is static or fluid over the courses of time and action.

Drawing strong parallels between the 1970s and today, Hallowell juxtaposes Doreen’s antiwar bombing at Columbia with her son Ian’s participation at an antiwar rally protesting American intervention in Iraq. Young Ian, headed off to college, contrasts sharply with his uncle Adam, who more than 30 years earlier felt a heavy civic burden to enlist with the Marines. Likewise, the contrast is vivid between Doreen’s two old friends — one who still clings to her college ideals, while the other wholeheartedly lives what the group used to call the “bourgeois life.”

Hallowell deftly sets up one deeply flawed character against an ever-changing backdrop of American history, and through it, prods the reader to examine the ephemeral ideas of identity and responsibility.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

In her lively and engaging book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence, Keli Goff asserts that America’s political parties ignore the new reality of the post-civil rights generation black American voter at their peril. Citing economic and social influences that have shifted dramatically in the last 40 years or so, Party Crashing explores how a once-unified voting bloc of African Americans that may have been loyal Democrats has evolved into today’s generation of young African American adults who refuse to allow either party to take their votes for granted. While Democrats may assume they’ve got the African American vote locked up, Republicans assume the same, and the result is a population that remains disenfranchised.

Surprised by the results of a 2001 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies poll, which showed 35 percent of African Americans aged 18 to 35 identified themselves as politically independent and 62 percent self-identified as Democrats, Goff worked with the Suffolk University Political Research Center to conduct another study in 2007. Curious as to whether the strong showing of independents in the original survey was a fluke or a reflection of real change within the black young adult community, the new poll queried 400 randomly selected African Americans, aged 18 to 45 (expanding the upper limit to include those who would have been eligible for participation in the first study). Among those asked, 35 percent of respondents 18 to 24-years-old self-identified as independent voters, and  41 percent of respondents self-identified as registered Democrats, but would not call themselves “committed Democrats.”

Intrigued by these results, Goff took her research directly to young African American adults for their thoughts on the relationship between skin color and voting preferences, and how and why it may have changed since their parents and grandparents’ generation.

Chapter by chapter, Goff examines the role of churches in African Americans’ historically strong ties to the Democratic party; the concept of black leadership in America and what that means, both within and outside the African American community; and Democratic and Republican political missteps in national, state, and local elections past. Goff complements her research study with a cultural analysis of Chris Rock’s stand-up comedy and Bill Cosby’s The Cosby Show, conversations with post-civil rights generation African American voters, and additional interviews with General Colin Powell, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, Bakari Kitwana (author of The Hip Hop Generation), Republican and Democratic Party officials, and more. The result is engaging, entertaining, and eye-opening.

Throughout the book, Goff returns time and again to the argument that the social and economic influences that supported young black Americans’ parents’ and grandparents’ allegiance to the Democratic Party have evolved. This generation of African Americans, born within the last 40 years, does not have the same first-hand experience with the civil rights era that their parents and grandparents had. There has been, in general, a generational shift that reflects increased tolerance of social issues, such as gay marriage. Also, the growing number of African American families in the middle and upper classes of American society has influenced their voting interests to weigh economic factors like tax policies more than ever before.

The end result is the fragmenting of a once-cohesive voting bloc. Independent-minded young African American adults are more likely to carefully question what a candidate and his or her policies can do for them instead of voting along party lines. Goff’s book demonstrates clearly that young African American voters firmly believe that candidates and parties must actively court their vote, and not just in the weeks before an election.

As with most politically oriented books, especially those published during an election cycle, the time is of the essence, and that’s true with Party Crashing. A few of the details Goff explores in her book have been resolved. For example, the contest between Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been resolved, with Sen. Obama the presumptive Democratic nominee. However, the big picture — the fact that the votes of young black Americans, either as a group or individually, cannot be taken for granted by any candidate of either party — is a valid one, worthy of discussion for the 2008 election and beyond.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

There’s no denying it — those iPods and their ubiquitous white earphones have had a strong influence on the business, entertainment, technical, and cultural landscape many of us grew up knowing. The adventure of the innovative iPod, from conception to consumer, is an exciting and enlightening story, chronicled by Steven Levy, senior editor and chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, in his book The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness.

Levy explores the impact of these personal digital music players on the music industry and on Apple Inc. He also delves into the idea of cool (namely, what is “cool” and how does an object get to be cool) and culture (what does it mean when we all “check out” with earphones). Levy’s affection for the object is clear — even to the point of writing each chapter as a standalone, enabling a shuffle of the book’s content in true iPod fashion, replicating the gadget’s feature that plays loaded songs in random order.

Levy’s fascinating inside look at how the iPod came to be is richer because of Apple’s cooperation with the project. The book includes numerous interviews with the people who made the iPod possible, including forerunners like Michael Robertson, the proprietor of MP3.com, one of the first efforts at legally selling music online. By covering how revolutionary the iPod was to the music industry (now selling individual songs a la carte instead of tied to albums only) and Apple (guiding the computer-maker’s foray into iPod-maker and then music-seller through iTunes), Levy sets the stage for turning the reader’s eye from the commercial to the cultural implications of the iPod.

Does putting on the white iPod earphones equate with tuning out and withdrawing from the world, or to being a more active listener? Levy’s book demonstrates that these are questions that have been asked since the dawn of the personal music device. Since 1972, when Andreas Pavel hooked up open-air headphones to a Sony cassette player, the implications of aural withdrawal from the surrounding world have been discussed, as the Sony Walkman took hold, then MP3 players in general, and the iPod in particular.

Levy presents both sides of the argument: that people are missing out on social connections versus fully enjoying their music by focusing on it. He builds on the idea of proactive enjoyment of music by citing that iPod users are now free of the restraints once placed on them by artist or record label limits via albums and CDs. The shuffle feature means the locked-in order of CD tracks no longer governs listening; the ability to buy songs individually from iTunes frees listeners from having to buy whole CDs when they want only one or two songs.

Levy further demonstrates this consumer-centric entertainment model by discussing the evolution of the podcast — digital media files, usually audio — that are distributed by syndication feeds and played on personal media devices like the iPod. No longer do people have to hope there’s something appealing being offered by a media company of any kind. People can make it themselves and get it out there via RSS feed. Plug in your iPod and download your podcasts for easy listening on your own schedule. Like zines and blogs before it, iPods make content delivery easier, another development in DIY (do-it-yourself) culture, leveling the cultural playing field and offering niche-creators access to a broader audience than they might have otherwise had.

This freedom — to enjoy your personal music library and digital files when, where, and how you like — is the crux of Levy’s examination of the ideas of culture and the iPod. 

The Perfect Thing is a compact yet broad view of the iPod’s impact on business, entertainment, and culture in about 250 pages. Levy weaves his narrative with lots of quotes and references to academic work on the subject. The book is never dry, however; Levy’s writing style is engaging and humorous (he refers to the record companies’ instruction to listeners to not download music illegally as akin to an etiquette lesson from the Green River Killer). He reports, interviews, and provides commentary in his examination of the ideas and issues surrounding widespread use of the iPod, although it is clear his book is only a measure of the iPod’s influence to date.

As popular culture continues to be distributed in an a la carte model (as witnessed by iTunes’ current offering of television series and episodes, film rentals and purchases, and audiobooks), and since acknowledgement of the iPod’s influence cannot be denied, it is anybody’s guess how future generations will view the iPod.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

While nature versus nurture may be one of those perennial questions, for people like Pippa Dunn, the protagonist of Alison Larkin’s new novel The English American, it’s not just academic. Pippa is the eldest daughter in a stiff-upper-lipped British family; she knows how to make a proper cup of tea, likes Marmite, and so on. However, where the rest of the Dunn family is neat and orderly, quiet, and focused, Pippa is outgoing, messy, artistic, and spontaneous. She’s always losing her things, forgetting to scrape the bowl clean before putting it in the sink, and she secretly hates Scottish dancing. She’s not happy at just any old job — she wants to follow her bliss and write plays. Pippa’s sure that her personality traits reflect those of her birth parents; she’s known that she was adopted since she was a small child. Now, as an adult, Pippa learns her parents are American — Southerners to be exact.

Feeling rudderless and out of place in England, Pippa tentatively reaches out to her birth mother in the United States, hopeful that she will measure up to the ideal that Pippa’s carried with her all these years: “She was beautiful, and delicate, with red hair, like mine, only hers wasn’t springy … The sight of her filled me with warmth and made all the fear go away.”

Her reunion with Billie, a flighty and exuberant redhead, is at first validation for Pippa — here is the woman from whom she inherited her enthusiasm for life, her creativity, and her relaxed attitude toward tidiness. Pippa also reconnects with her father Walt, a Washington, D.C.–area businessman who is actively involved in international affairs.

Joy and relief at finding her appearance and personality reflected in the people who gave her life soon turn to the cold realization that while Billie and Walt may be her parents, they don’t behave like family. Billie’s manipulative attempts to make Pippa reciprocate her neediness in the relationship and Walt’s hesitance to divulge Pippa’s existence to his wife and children leave Pippa feeling as out of place as she did before.

The English American is threaded with a romantic subplot that expertly and subtly evokes Pippa’s assumptions about other people’s identity as she struggles with her own. It provides a nice twist to the main storyline, save for when it involves Nick, a tortured artist type whom Pippa thinks she loves from afar, and who appears in the book almost exclusively via email messages. Where the relationship between Pippa and Nick is concerned, the storyline goes off the rails a bit, since so little about Nick is revealed until the final chapters, and the only communication between him and Pippa is through email; he’s a comparatively flat character.

Alison Larkin’s take on the issue of identity, while couched in a fast-paced contemporary novel, infuses the subject with realism, humor, and compassion. Larkin’s writing is at her finest when she is plumbing the depths of Pippa’s psyche. The novel echoes elements of her one-woman show, The English American. Larkin’s own life aligns with Pippa’s somewhat, as Larkin too is an American-born adoptee raised by a British family.

From the red tape and bureaucratic delays Pippa encounters in trying to obtain the names and contact information of her birth parents, to introducing herself (albeit with a posh British accent) in a bar as a “redneck,” Larkin’s ability to know just when to use a light touch buoys the darker, more emotionally powerful scenes in which Pippa’s self-reflection takes her to the depths of acknowledging who she is, who she wants to be, and how much she may or may not owe her parents.

Pippa comes to realize it is up to her alone to reconcile her roots and her upbringing. Until she can navigate the rocky boundary between genetic and environmental influences, she can never feel comfortable in her own skin. And while people may continue to argue about the influence of nature versus nurture for as long as they’re able, at least Pippa Dunn finds peace as she settles the question for herself.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Clarissa Iverton’s mother once told her she was named not after Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: “I named you after this Clarissa, with the hope that you’d rewrite history.” When that opportunity comes years later, it’s up to Clarissa to decide whether or not to take it, in this third book by Vendela Vida.

At 28 years old, Clarissa earns her living editing subtitles, cleaning up poor translations of foreign language films, and fixing other people’s words so that their meaning is clear. Ironically
though, nothing can fix the discovery of another man’s name where she expects to see her father’s listed on her birth certificate. Even more stunning, Clarissa’s fiancé admits that even he and his mother had known the truth for years. Never having fully come to terms with the disappearance of her mother, Olivia, 14 years earlier, this fresh vanishing of a parent sends Clarissa into an emotional and existential tailspin.

Adrift in grief and betrayal, Clarissa takes off for Finnish Lapland in search of her real father, the Sami man whose name is on her birth certificate. Clarissa’s search within the Sami community, despite her being unable to speak the language, is surprisingly fruitful, but not in the way she anticipates. In a complete reversal, the level of communication between Clarissa and the people she meets in Lapland is light years beyond the depth and breadth of the communication between the people with whom she shares a language, a home — even blood — prompting her to reexamine all she has previously believed about family, community, and identity.

Vendela Vida’s spare and concise prose is more like a series of vignettes than a long, detailed narrative. Yet it makes real to the reader the desolation and isolation of Finnish Lapland’s geography, of the insular Sami people, and of Clarissa’s feelings of aloneness. In spending two weeks among the Sami, Clarissa isn’t known as Olivia and Richard’s daughter, Jeremy’s sister, Pankaj’s fiancé; she’s half a world away from home and stripped of the identity pressed upon her by those around her.

It’s only through reconciling what she’s learned about her family history with what she articulates about her own personal history that she can even consider rewriting anything, balancing what her family — her mother in particular — may owe her and what she owes them. Only by fully realizing the truth of who she is and where she is from, can Clarissa transcend a legacy of secrets, betrayal, and grief.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Admit it — you see a short bus and you pretty much think you know the kind of kid who is riding in it. Jonathan Mooney is not your average short bus rider though — wait — maybe he is. As a child, Mooney, an Ivy League university graduate, was diagnosed as dyslexic and labeled a severely learning disabled student. As he grew up, he was taunted and teased, made to feel inferior and inadequate by teachers and school administrators, and struggled with his identity and with where he fit in.

Now an adult and still processing the childhood experiences in which he heard, directly or indirectly, again and again, that he wasn’t normal, Mooney decided to take a road trip — on the short bus, of course — to meet fellow children and adults negotiating similar terrain. He has chronicled his experiences in The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal.

In this cross-country jaunt, Mooney’s book goes beyond memoir/travelogue to include brief asides on the history and the current use of various labels. In the process, he explores what it means to be normal, to be different, and to fit in with our culture and our society.

To Mooney, even a label as innocuous-sounding as “learning disabled” is fraught with unspoken meaning and judgment, the impact of which might not be realized by many people: “The label ‘learning disabled’ may seem minor in a world full of labels, but in the context of normalcy and self-acceptance, it matters deeply. A kid who on every other level appears normal and could pass for normal is pulled out of the crowd and told, in essence, that he isn’t right, isn’t like everyone else.” It’s this message — which sets a child up for a pattern of failing to meet the cognitive expectations of the education system — that has long-lasting repercussions.

In Mooney’s opinion, placing the blame for shortcomings in academic achievement squarely on the shoulders of children and their parents deflects attention away from shortcomings in the accepted standard of intelligence and learning. Medicalizing variations in learning styles and abilities shunts parents’ attention to their child’s neurological defect or deficiency instead of allowing them to see the big picture: that perhaps the problem isn’t with their kid, but with the way our culture views intelligence.

Focusing on de facto case studies of a diverse group of people with cognitive differences, Mooney’s day-in-the-life observations are compassionate yet brutally honest — with himself and with his reader. He cuts himself no slack in admitting his own discomfort during his first impressions of Ashley, a deaf and blind child. He wonders at her ability to learn, believing that ability to be one of the primary criteria for defining what it means to be a valuable person, and finds she exceeds his expectations in more ways than one.

From troubled children whose educational needs are not being met by the school system, to adults who’ve never received a formal diagnosis of any kind but who live life according to their own rules, The Short Bus offers readers a close-up of how students and adults labeled as learning disabled assert their own identities beyond established societal expectations. For example, Mooney meets up with his old friend Kent, who was labeled as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but who managed to do a 24-hour comedy routine. This leads Mooney to ask the question: If the guy has no attention span, how could he do anything for 24 straight hours? Wouldn’t that indeed require a great deal of concentration and attention?

Mooney, also the coauthor of Learning Outside the Lines (Fireside, 2000), loses his narrative focus a bit about three-quarters of the way through the book, when he arrives in the Nevada desert for the annual Burning Man Festival: “Here, I thought, I would let go of these old selves. But first, I had to experience being someone new, living without regard to the norms, for the next five days.”

But even in a place like Burning Man, there are norms; even in a society without rules, the community still self-organizes into a place with cliques and “cool kids,” much to Mooney’s surprise. “I felt increasingly desperate to fit in at Burning Man and it showed.” Mooney gets a Mohawk haircut and finds out what millions of women already know: A new haircut really amounts to no more than a new haircut; no matter how good it looks (or doesn’t look), you’re still the same person walking out of the salon that you were walking in.

“I had traveled all this way, only to find myself at the end of the tunnel, no different.” This one statement risks undoing all Mooney has done in his book up to that point — his rejection of the standard of normalcy, his advocacy that our culture increase its tolerance and understanding of cognitive differences and abilities. Here, Mooney is showing that he’s just as preoccupied with being normal as anyone else is — which is, ironically, totally normal.

The final stops on his short bus journey bring Mooney back full circle, helping him learn to expand his definition of normal, as his Uncle Bill put it, and leading him to affirm his identity as a short bus rider, on his own terms, once and for all. In the process, he leads readers to re-examine how they think of people with diverse abilities and the way we, as a society, treat them and allow them to be treated.

Mooney’s writing style is affable and easy, and pulls no punches, even when events paint him in a not-so-flattering light. His persuasive arguments prompt self-examination in the reader, and support new ways of thinking beyond the traditional education/intelligence standard. While I found the ending to be a bit flat, overall, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal is a powerful book that offers readers a road map for exploring our culture’s preconceived notions about abilities and labels.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Andrea Levy’s warm and loving literary postcard from Jamaica presents a long, diverse, and dynamic family history — a vivid blend of personalities, nationalities, and even prejudices, without being judgmental. The challenges of straddling two cultures can be readily found in modern fiction, but in Levy’s capable and empathetic hands (Levy herself is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants), the insulated story of the Jackson family — as told in Levy’s novel Fruit of the Lemon — has a timeless quality that makes this 1999 novel worthy of its new Picador reissue, and a recommended read of the Essence magazine book club.
 
All parents dream of a life for their child that’s better than their own. Jamaican immigrants Mildred and Wade Jackson are no different, wishing only the best for their daughter, Faith. So after moving to London, Faith’s parents remained tight-lipped about their hometown, leaving their daughter to wonder about being teased at school: “Faith’s a darkie and her mum and dad came on a banana boat.”
 
“It was a proper boat with cabins and everything,” says her mother. “Even had a dance every evening and we took turns to sit at the captain’s table. What, you think we sit among the bananas?” But Faith’s notions of her family’s past remain sketchy — stitched-together bits and pieces she gleans from offhand comments over the years. It isn’t until she begins her professional career in television, moves out of the cocoon of her parents’ home, and her mother and father begin to speak of going “home” to Jamaica, that Faith’s identity and self-awareness are shaken to the very core.

At the same time, experiences arise that open Faith’s eyes to the existence of racism: Despite getting a promotion at work, she’s still effectively held back; a white woman she and her brother go to see about a used car behaves as if they’re about to rob her; a terrible incident of urban violence highlights the differences between her and her white friends. These events begin to unmoor Faith from all she had grown to believe about herself and her identity.

Desperate to rescue their daughter from an emotional tailspin, Faith’s parents decide to send her to Jamaica for a visit with her maternal aunt Coral. Thus, Faith begins her journey completely unaware of her Jamaican heritage, blinded by her own assumptions and stereotypes about life on the Caribbean island. Once there, through the storytelling of her relatives, she learns of her parents’ rich social, cultural, and economic heritage, and of her extensive family tree æ men and women who loved in the face of racial and class prejudice, lived under the shadow of harsh economic conditions, and yet still prized family above all. She begins to develop, for the first time, her own ethnic and cultural identity.

Elements of Faith’s sudden revelations feel a bit unbelievable. Though in England she carries on a longtime friendship with a woman whose father is blatantly racist, she maintains an implausible lack of awareness about prejudice until her arrival in Jamaica. But Levy, whose novel Small Island won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Orange Prize, shows obvious skill in building a moving narrative that is sentimental without being saccharine. Throughout the novel, she deftly captures the speech patterns and styles of her British and Jamaican characters, and wisely avoids caricature and stereotype, imbuing Faith’s family and friends with staunch individuality in thought, word, and deed.
 
The structure of the book is particularly effective: Family legends and stories are threaded throughout Faith’s narrative, with each new tale accompanied by an ever-expanding family tree diagram that incorporates the previous story. The initial tale of Mildred and Wade is thin and spare, but as Faith learns more about her family history, the tales become more dramatic and lively, visually and thematically infusing the family with life.

As her visit to Jamaica comes to an end, Faith is finally open to incorporating her Jamaican culture into her English identity. “Let them say what they like. Because I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day.” In the end, neither her Jamaican heritage nor her Englishness is completely subsumed by the other. Proud to draw upon the strength of her Jamaican roots, Faith returns to England triumphant, the roots of the lemon tree holding firmly while the new branches reach ever upward, distant blooms bearing fruit.

Amy Brozio-Andrews