Sting of the Bee

When Marty Sanders returns to Jamaica to visit his father after a thirteen-year separation, his mother in America fears that she may lose her son forever

Summoned back to Jamaica by his dying father, young Martinson Sanders, his smug sense of security founded on a Boston education and his mother's professorial status, steps off the plane at Montego Bay already nervous about the back-country living he will encounter. As Sanders slips unconsciously into the customs of the people among whom he spent his first 13 years, comes to revere his father's wisdom and courage, and learns to respect village loyalties, the question of where he belongs becomes increasingly pressing. So thoroughly has he been acculturated and accepted, however, that until his mother arrives for his father's funeral, his certainty about the importance of his Jamaican heritage is unshaken. But her presence in the old house turns his own existence there into an anachronism, and he wonders whether any solution is possible. Although the ambiance of the island and its peope are so accurately rendered that Marty's reluctance to leave is credible, the charactersare unshaded and Marty himself emerges as not much more than a device to mirror the two worlds. At least half of this first novel, moreover, is written in the argot peculiar to Jamaica and while this may lend verisimilitude, it does not make for an easy read.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Martinson Sanders, the son of a Jamaican bush farmer and an American professor, returns to Jamaica to see his dying father. He has not been in his native country for 13 years, since his mother fled with him back to the S tates from what she saw as a stultifying life. Marty at first has nothing but disdain for the rural Jamaican ways. As he becomes involved with the people of Rose Hill, he rediscovers his long - buried Jamaican soul. After his father's death, he must decide whether Rose Hill or Cambridge, Massachusetts is really his home. In a lively prose that alternates standard English with Jamaican English, Rolbein paints a convincing and sympathetic picture of Jamaican country life. An accomplished, engrossing first novel. Janet Boyarin Blundell, M.L.S., Brookdale Community Coll. Adjunct Faculty, Lincroft, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.