This is a collection of short stories about children and young people in Jamaica. Full of wonderfully atmospheric background detail combined with the rhythms and patterns of speech, these contemporary narratives bring to life a culture highly relevant to multi ethnic Britain. Stories include "Becky and the Wheels and Brake Boys"; "A Thief in the Village"; "Tukku Tukku and Sampson"; "All other Days Run into Sunday"; "The Mouth Organ Boys"; "Elias and the Mongoose"; "The Pet, The Sea and Little Buddy"; "Fanso and Granny-Flo"; and, "The Banana Tree".
Thief in the Village: And Other Stories of Jamaica FROM THE PUBLISHER Nenna and her brother Man-Man sneak from shadow to tree trunk in the dead of night, concealing themselves while tracking a coconut thief. Gustas barely survives a violent hurricane, trying to save his fruit-laden banana tree. Becky begs her mother for a bicycle, and Fanso longs to know his father who walked out of his life thirteen years earlier.
FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly The phrases in these stories, all set in Jamaica, are musical in print, even before they are read aloud. ``I know total-total that if I had my own bike, the Wheels-and-Brake Boys wouldn't treat me like that,'' Becky tells readers in ``Becky and the Wheels-and-Brake-Boys,'' and, with those words, her determination is established. By the end of the tale, she gets her wish and rides alongside the boys who had seemed to her fearless. ``Usually I think I live in the poorest back-o'-wall bush place,'' begins the narrator of ``All Other Days Run into Sunday,'' a boy who knows that the mischief of the other days of the week always tries to creep into Sunday's calm specialness. In the title story, an honest man is maligned in such a way that the villagers may never again be so sure of themselves. Berry's prose is liquid and cool; in ``Fanso and Granny-Flo'' and elsewhere his descriptions are so original that the language is rendered meaningful and new: ``Fanso's comings and goings and concerns were so well woven in with his granny's, it was hard to tell he had a big secret worry.'' How better to express the phase when the young adult begins to pull away from childhood? The collection is epiphanic; each story wraps itself around ordinary incidents and transforms them into lore. Ages 12-up. (March)
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