Greenwichtown

This book was so very captivating! I loved the narrator! I was a little disappointed with the ending, I have so many unanswered questions. Hopefully a part 2 is in the making. Overall this read was amazing!

This is a story full of heartache and hope, injustice and resilience. Fay escapes a life of poverty in the country as a small child, only to endure poverty and abuse in the city slums. Her perpetual state of hunger is heartbreaking enough, but after moving to the ghetto with her older sister, she must now face the underbelly of society: desperation, corruption, danger, and death. Her only solace is attending school, where she thrives in hopes of achieving the grades she needs to obtain a decent paying job and break the cycle of poverty in her family. She encounters many obstacles along the way, and some are quite hard to digest. The choices her sister makes are infuriating at times, and for most of the book I despised her. They have a complicated relationship, but in the end it appears that she does love Fay and wants the best for her. This is an eye-opening glimpse into the part of Jamaica not glamorized on TV. I loved how the author includes tough issues like women using their bodies to survive, religion mixing with mysticism, police brutality, various types of abuse, etc. There's a lot to chew on here. The author takes us on a journey as Fay comes of age and must make some difficult life decisions for herself. These decisions set the course for her future, which is not without sorrow and loss. Towards the end of the book I felt like there were some loose ends that could have been tied together more. It felt a bit rushed, but this is a minor flaw, or perhaps it simply went against my personal preference. Regardless, this book stole my heart, and I wish more people knew about it. On another note, Robin Miles did such a fantastic job bringing this book to life with a convincing Jamaican dialect that I would not have been able to imitate in my own mind.