How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

A Darker Side of the Bajan Paradise
Review of the Harper Collins paperback edition (2021) of the Little, Brown & Co. hardcover (2021)

Early in How the One-Armed Sister..., a character relates an island fable of two sisters, one wise and one reckless, who venture near a monster's cave. The reckless sister goes too close and loses an arm in the process, but is at least rescued by her more cautious sibling. The morale of the story becomes that the one-armed sister is fated to remain single, as a one-armed woman would supposedly not be able to even manage simple household chores such as sweeping. Cherie Jones' debut novel then proceeds to show how various such "one-armed" women proceed with their lives through various dangerous decisions and show more traumatic incidents.

The main focus is on Lala (nickname of Stella) who is married to Adan. Adan is a brutal burglar and drugs smuggler who also physically abuses Lala. We realize that Lala has only married Adan to escape from a restrictive life with her grandmother Wilma. We gradually learn of Wilma's and Lala's mother Esme's lives throughout the book, which were also subject to domestic abuse, which had resulted in Esme's death. Adan's most recent burglary in an affluent villa has resulted in the death of Mira's husband. Mira was a former islander who had married a man from England in order to escape her past life. Observing much of this is Tone, a gigolo and jet-ski tourist guide, who was once the childhood love of Lala and who now hopes to save her from Adan.

Jones builds her character backgrounds very effectively in this study of lives of struggle against both poverty and domestic trauma where each of the women are making their life decisions and then working to maintain the focus needed to survive and then to possibly escape.

My thanks to Karan for the loan, and for my first-ever reading of a Bajan writer.

Trivia and Links
Although the Baxter's Beach location of the novel is fictitious, it is likely inspired by Bridgetown, Barbados locations such as Baxter's Road with the tunnels inspired by locations such as the Harrison Caves. show less

I picked this book up on a whim and my god, what a freaking gut-punch it was.

This book puts the darker side of humanity front and center and pulls no punches when it comes to showing what some people are willing to do in order to get ahead or just to survive.

I felt my heart absolutely breaking for Lala and how she constantly had to brace herself and change her true nature just to survive her husband's violent moods. I also felt equally sorry for Wilma, though we did not get to see much of her. Wilma's story was just as fucked up though her way of dealing with that did make me a little upset even though it came from a place of survival.

Tone and the doctor we catch glimpses of seemed to be the only not-shit men in the whole book. Tone show more even managed to make me feel terrible for him, especially after we find out what happened to him as a kid.

I did like the ending, but I wish we got a little more information about how things ultimately turned out. show less

“Extremes of anything are bad, and the two extremes of possession – deprivation and deluge – are especially crippling to the soul.”

Set in Barbados this book tells the story of three generations of women involved in abusive relationships. The tale of the one-armed sister is a Barbadian folktale that older women employ to warn younger women to avoid abusive men. It is a story about how many young women do not heed the lesson and do the things their mothers and grandmothers have warned them not to do.

This is a difficult book to rate. It is a powerful and disturbing story of the cycle of abuse and its devastating results. I cannot say I enjoyed it, but I was never tempted to abandon it and cared what happened to the main show more characters. As a warning, this book involves the death of an infant, which occurs near the beginning and has repercussions throughout the story.

3.5 show less

In a Barbados unseen by tourists, two Barbadian women struggle with the aftermath of a violent event. Mira married a wealthy Brit, but their yearly vacation is destroyed by a home invasion that ends in a death and Mira is left to deal with her sorrow and loss. Lala runs off and marries Adan when she is still a teenager and soon after has a baby. Raising the baby in a small and rundown house is difficult and it's made more difficult as Adan turns abusive and controlling. When their baby dies, Lala is left to hold together what she can.

This is a novel willing to lean hard into misery. Moments of grace or simply relief from the unrelenting poverty, crime and misery these women experience are rarely seen. There was certainly a lot going on show more with this novel, from rapist grandfathers, to dead babies, to violent sociopaths, but I think that the misery would have had more impact if it had been leavened with with grace and hope now and again. Jones's writing is assured and full of life, and there's no question that she has a bright future as a writer. show less

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House might lead you to think that this is a quirky, fun novel but it’s not. It’s a brutally honest look at poverty, relationships (from incest to domestic violence) and the extremes people will go to for someone they love or money. It’s heartbreaking and contrasts particularly well the differences between the rich visitors to Barbados and the people who live there in poverty, dependent on the tourist trade for money.

Lala is the major character of the novel, although several chapters are told from the perspectives of others. Lala’s grandmother told her a folktale as a child to try to get her to behave (this is where the title came from) but she didn’t always heed it. It’s only the reader show more who realises the full meaning of her grandmother’s tale later in the novel. Now an adult, Lala has married Adan and is about to have his child. She lives in a ramshackle shack above the beach with a Pepsi sign for a door. When she goes into labour, she’s by herself. Seeking help, she rings the buzzer at one of the fancy beach houses, only for it to be answered by Adan. He’s just killed a wealthy foreigner in pursuit of money and caused devastation to his widow, Mira. Mira is from Barbados, but escaped to London with Peter. Now she realises that she really loved him, but how can she let him know? Adan’s trail of destruction doesn’t end with Mira, but with assault leading to the death of his child. Now the police are on the hunt and things get very mixed up as he tries to coerce his friend Tone into helping him pull off a big crime…

I’ve seen this book described as a thriller and I think that misses the point. One murder and some crime does not a thriller make. To me, this is a novel about poverty, forced decisions and trying to do the best with what you have. There is a lot of love in this novel, as well as regret. Sometimes some of the other characters’ points of view felt a bit extra, such as the police sergeant. The chopping and changing of viewpoints I felt made some of the things that happened to Lala and her family less powerful. However, it did illustrate that not everything was as it seemed and all the characters had regrets. Jones writes well and infuses a lot of emotion into her writing – one couldn’t help feel for Lala and all she had experienced at a young age. It’s a solid debut that will make the reader consider what life is really like for those who live and work in tourist hotspots.

Thank you to Hachette for the copy of this book. My review is honest.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com show less

Short-listed for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction

How the One-Armed Sister sweeps the House is a debut novel and is an impressive first. It drew me into a world I knew little about, Baxter Beach, a hypothetical beach community in Barbados, a paradise for wealthy tourists and a hellish trap for its impoverished inhabitants who live at the edge. Poverty and inequity provide the backdrop for the main focus of the novel intergenerational domestic abuse and its impact on women.

Lala, the protagonist, is an 18-year-old woman who eeks out a living beading tourists' hair on the beach. Lala is married and has become pregnant by Adan, a handsome and abusive thief. The latter kills a British tourist during a botched robbery on the evening of his show more daughter's premature birth. The story centers on the aftermath of their daughter's traumatic birth and accidental death amidst the dual investigation of both events as Adan's abusive behavior spirals out of control.

To author Cherie Jones' credit, the story never descends into melodrama. Instead, her writing is crisp, almost matter-of-fact, descriptive of the world as it is. She uses multiple narratives to move the story back and forth through time, providing Lala's family history of domestic abuse and Adan's history as a bully and abuser. The story is well-paced, and Jones maintains the tension throughout.
I had difficulty putting this powerful, sad work of literary fiction down. However, I look forward to reading Jones's future work. show less

I chose this as an audiobook for morning walks because the title appeared on the longlist of the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The novel is set in 1984 in Barbados, in the fictional town of Paradise with a stretch of beach known as Baxter’s Beach. Eighteen-year-old Lala is trapped in a violent marriage. Her husband Adan kills a rich white man, Peter Whalen, during a robbery on the night Lala gives birth to their daughter. That murder is followed by another death, and more tragedy.

The novel is organized into short chapters giving the perspective of various characters. Lala, Adan, Mira Whalen (the widow of the murdered man), Tone (a beach gigolo and Adan’s partner in petty crimes), and Sergeant Beckles (the police investigator) show more have several chapters, but other characters like Esme (Lala’s mother), Wilma (Lala’s grandmother), and the Queen of Sheba (a prostitute with whom Beckles is infatuated) also receive some attention.

Despite the number of characters, there is no difficulty differentiating them. What is amazing is that sufficient information is given about each that their behaviour is understandable. Backstories are provided for several characters so their motivations make perfect sense. The childhoods of virtually all the characters include poverty, violence and abuse.

A major message is that lives are defined by trauma generation after generation. Lala, for example, is raised as she is because of the experiences of Esme and Wilma. Lala lives in a beachfront shack with 25 cement stairs to the sand; there is no banister and that serves as a perfect metaphor for her life. It is not unexpected that Lala wonders, “What woman leaves a man for something she is likely to suffer at the hands of any other” because “for women of her lineage, a marriage meant a murder in one form or another.”

This is not a book for the weak-hearted. Murder, rape, incest, domestic violence, drug dealing, poverty, and prostitution all are featured. For tourists, Paradise may be an escape from reality, but for the locals, Paradise is the reality they are trying to escape. Unfortunately, escape seems impossible because events conspire to entrap people. Tone wants to rescue Lala, but Sheba’s need to escape the attentions of Beckles means Tone is ensnared. Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope in the ending, but it is faint.

The prose is beautiful, and the narration by Danielle Vitalis is exceptional, but readers should be forewarned that the novel is heart-breaking. It is so full of tragedy as to be emotionally exhausting.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less