Cherie Jones' How the One-Armed sister Sweeps Her House

Cherie Jones! https://cheriesueannjonesblog.wordpress.com/about/ Another debut novelist who knocks it out of the park on the first swing! “How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House” is simply dazzling, perhaps a strange term to describe a book about the long arc of domestic violence as it passes down through three generations. After Lala’s mom died, her grandmother Wilma grudgingly took her in but watched her like a hawk. All that scrutiny could not save Stella, who preferred to be called Lala, from pregnancy though, so she packs her bags and moves down the road to Adan’s one-room shack on Barbados’s Baxter’s Beach.

Lala had been a girl with dreams. She set up her hair braiding booth smack dab on the sand in front of the gorgeous high-rise, gated condominiums where wealthy Europeans relaxed for months at a time. She had a way with the women. Her sunny disposition and magic hands earned her a decent amount of money. She was saving to get away.

What drew her to Adan? Maybe the fact that he had ambitions too? But Adan didn’t work for the money he flaunted when he was flush. He had learned how to break and enter from his stepfather when he was only ten. In fact, he was robbing a home the night Lala went into labor. In pain and frightened she ran down the street to the first mansion with lights on and leaned on the bell. Lala heard the gunshot, then the scream, and somehow intuited that her life was about to drastically change.

Jones, a victim of abuse herself, must have found it deeply cathartic to write certain scenes. They are terrifying in their reality. Both Wilma and Stella exhibit that wariness and obsequiousness that plagues a woman who is physically or emotionally beaten down. Always trying to gauge the mood of the man, what might set him off, is exhausting. When the blow comes, no matter how many times it has been landed before, it is always a shock.

Every character in this amazing book has a deeply disturbing backstory. Jones is generous in sharing these with us, never making a judgment or an excuse. There are Peter and Mira, the victims of Adan’s latest B & E, and there’s Adan’s best friend and Stella’s first lover, Tone, damaged by a childhood trauma yet still able to love. Jones is psychologically astute when writing about the stages of grief and when interrogating the deadly resentments fomented by racial and class divisions on an island that appears from the outside to be Paradise.

Beautiful cover. Gorgeous writing. 2021 is shaping up to be stellar year for literature!