The Starside of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson - May 2017

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The Starside of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson - May 2017

Post by Clare Bookclub Mod » Thu May 25, 2017 12:47 pm

I was heading to Barbados on holidays and felt I needed a novel set there to totally immerse myself. I was not disappointed with this book.

After their mother can no longer care for them, young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados to live with their grandmother Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah.

Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, accompanies her grandmother in her role as a midwife, and investigates their mother's mysterious life.

When the father they barely know comes to Bird Hill to reclaim his daughters, and both Phaedra and Dionne must choose between the Brooklyn they once knew and loved or the Barbados of their family.

Naomi Jackson is the author of a novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill. Star Side was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. The Black Caucus of the American Library Association named Jackson’s novel an Honor Book for Fiction. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, Jackson’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, The Caribbean Writer and Obsidian. She is the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, and Camargo Foundation.

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