Last Room. This item is unavailable.Last Room

Valerie Barton is charged with the task of being the Barton who must take the family from the "last room" of the vestiges of slavery, into the "mansions of the world". Born into the third generation of African-Jamaicans after the abolition of European slavery, she is entrusted with a life mission.

This first novel by a Jamaican writer contains a plethora of colorful voices, but they jangle rather than harmonizing with one another. Each brief chapter is headed by a person's name, or sometimes merely a description (such as "The Foreigner-Jamaican"). If not for these road signs, the identity of the speaker or protagonist would often be impossible to guess, and to add to the confusion, the chapters jump from first to third person and from the present to the past tense. The story of a woman named Putus, "meaning SWEET AND SPECIAL," and her daughter, Icylane, revolves around bad men. One takes Putus's mother away from her, another fathers Icylane, and a third--an unreliable musician who has already fathered three children with two other women--insists that Icylane either have his child or go away. Putus and Icylane live sad lives that end badly, but their own detachment stunts any sympathy. In the center of all of this is a chapter explaining, in encyclopedic style, the importance and uniqueness of the Seville orange, an inedibly bitter fruit that is meant to represent Putus's experience in emigrating from Jamaica to England.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.