Caribbean Beat — September/October 2018 (#153)

ookshelf
The Art of White Roses
by Viviana Prado-Núñez (Papillote Press, 192 pp, ISBN 9781999776824)
It’s 1957 in Havana, and Adela can’t close
her eyes to the trail of los desaparecidos.
In the crumbling suburb of Marianao,
she knows the names of the university
students who go missing. She knows
the city isn’t a safe place, that more is
swept under the rug of complicit silence
than can ever be aired aloud. When
Adela’s cousin Miguel gets caught up in
a bombing, the backlash of fear takes up
residence in Adela’s blue-walled home:
“If someone had stalked across the lawn
and cracked the window open, they
would have heard our hearts beating dull
and muted, like the echo of someone
tapping their fingers on the other side
of a wall.”
This is Viviana Prado-Núñez’s debut,
The Art of White Roses, winner of the
2017 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean
Young Adult Literature. The world it reveals to us is beset by
suspicions, ravaged by everyday loss on a tragic scale, but the
place itself is not immune to beauty. Whether it’s a box of
brilliant red shoes, or a sumptuously fat lemon dangling just
out of reach, the author shows us how
portents of allure and pleasure still linger
— even if those very symbols turn sour
eventually. It’s this attention to detail
that renders this an unforgettable first
book, for young adults and adults alike:
it lacks nothing of the careful suspense,
the searing irony, the heartbreakingly
staggered revelations that mark work for
older readers.
Even rarer still, The Art of White
Roses is a compassionate novel without
being a cloying one. It presents us
with characters who are flawed and
redeemable, from Adela’s own father
Sebastián, full of false starts and halfbrewed
lies, to Adela’s Tío Rodrigo, the
once-burly policeman who shrinks in
reverse proportion to the magnitude
of his crimes. Prado-Núñez casts white
roses into the thicket of this bitter revolution, charging
an uncertain age with hard-won hope. This novel is for
dreamers and revolutionaries: those who’ve disappeared
and those who remember them.
The Beast of Kukuyo
by Kevin Jared Hosein (Blouse & Skirt Books,
240 pp, ISBN 9789768267153)
Looking for a Nancy Drew heroine?
Keep looking. In Kevin Jared
Hosein’s The Beast of Kukuyo,
fifteen-year-old protagonist Rune
Mathura is plucky and resourceful
— but she has the sense to know
there’s darkness in the world that
a flashlight and can-do attitude
can’t fix. When her classmate
Dumpling Heera winds up dead,
Rune knows that the baleful
secrets stirring in Kukuyo Village
can’t stay hidden — not forever. In this second-place
winner of the 2017 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean
Young Adult Literature, Hosein delivers a hair-raiser of a
tale, replete with small-time gangsters, sad prostitutes
swaying to Sundar Popo ballads, and survival of the fittest.
It’s tempting to call The Beast of Kukuyo the perfect
Stephen King and Sam Selvon mash-up, but Kevin Jared
Hosein’s voice is distinctively his own, tinged with dark
humour.
Home Home
by Lisa Allen-Agostini (Papillote Press, 100 pp,
ISBN 9781999776831)
Where is it safe to lay your head,
when it’s your thoughts that turn
against you? Home Home, the
third-place winner of the 2017
CODE Burt Award for Caribbean
Young Adult Literature, lets
us inside the mind of Kayla, a
Trinidadian girl diagnosed with
depression. Sent to recuperate
at the Edmonton home of her
lesbian aunt, Kayla’s uncertainty
about her place in life is only one
of the things that gives her pause. For instance, what
does it mean to be LGBT? What does it mean when a
cute boy who shares your taste in music also thinks you’re
pretty? Home Home pulls no punches about an interior
life with mental illness: Kayla is written compellingly, with
compassion, sensitivity, and uncommon insight.
34 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM