When Patsy gets her
long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to
leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where
she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with
her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped
in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their
young love. But Patsy’s plans don’t include her overzealous,
evangelical mother—or even her five-year-old daughter, Tru.Beating
with the pulse of a long-witheld confession, Patsy gives voice to a
woman who looks to America for the opportunity to choose herself
first—not to give a better life to her family back home. Patsy
leaves Tru behind in a defiant act of self-preservation, hoping for a
new start where she can be, and love, whomever she wants. But when
Patsy arrives in Brooklyn, America is not as Cicely’s treasured
letters described; to survive as an undocumented immigrant, she is
forced to work as a bathroom attendant and nanny. Meanwhile, Tru
builds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica,
grappling with her own questions of identity and sexuality, and
trying desperately to empathize with her mother’s decision.Expertly
evoking the jittery streets of New York and the languid rhythms of
Jamaica, Patsy weaves between the lives of Patsy and Tru in vignettes
spanning more than a decade as mother and daughter ultimately find a
way back to one another.As with her masterful debut, Here Comes the
Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn once again charts the geography of a hidden
world—that of a paradise lost, swirling with the echoes of lilting
patois, in which one woman fights to discover her sense of self in a
world that tries to define her. Passionate, moving, and fiercely
urgent, Patsy is a prismatic depiction of immigration and
womanhood, and the lasting threads of love stretching across years
and oceans.