{"id":50244,"date":"2023-01-13T11:12:24","date_gmt":"2023-01-13T16:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/?p=50244"},"modified":"2023-01-07T12:12:49","modified_gmt":"2023-01-07T17:12:49","slug":"the-islands-by-dionne-irving-in-shelf-awareness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/the-islands-by-dionne-irving-in-shelf-awareness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Islands by Dionne Irving [in Shelf Awareness]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Nine of the 10 stories in The Islands<\/em>, the deeply satisfying first collection of short fiction from University of Notre Dame professor Dionne Irving (Quint<\/em>), center women who share a Jamaican background. The plurality inherent in the title cleverly points to Jamaica but also England and, likewise, the insulated enclaves that diasporic communities create in faraway places.<\/p>\n

Younger Black women reevaluate their interracial (power) relationships with older men in four stories: “All-Inclusive,” about a model involved with a married white poet; “The Cape,” in which a former student married to her professor struggles with his recovery after an (easily avoidable, ahem!) accident; “An American Idea of Fun,” about an Ohio teen manipulated by the father of family friends who invite her for a summer in France; and “The Gifts,” in which a Jamaican teen finds work as a nanny with a posh London family and leaves pregnant.<\/p>\n

Prickly mother-daughter relationships are exposed in “Some People,” about a would-be screenwriter asked to participate in International Day at her daughter’s school, and “Waking Life,” about a travel journalist planning to meet her estranged mother. In “Canal,” a Toronto woman returns to Panama to settle the affairs of a woman she had to call “abuelita” as a child. In “Weaving,” the one story without a female protagonist, a boxer past his prime steals a piglet for his daughter \u2013 but arrives too late on her birthday.<\/p>\n

Irving writes with an easy openness, her sentences seemingly straightforward, in stories with much that can be inferred between the lines: inequity, imbalance, erasure. She has a remarkable talent for understated, multilayered density that reveals stifling responsibilities, desperate dreams, and fluttering hopes.<\/p>\n

Discover<\/strong>: Diasporic Black women populate nine of the 10 stories with Jamaican roots in this outstanding collection.<\/p>\n

Review<\/strong>: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness<\/em>, January 6, 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nine of the 10 stories in The Islands, the deeply satisfying first collection of short fiction from University of Notre Dame professor Dionne Irving (Quint), center women who share a Jamaican background. 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