100 Books Like Limbo

As a child, I sometimes sensed the problems of the world and felt an anger at my helplessness to solve them.

The first time I read Kincaid’s writing, I was struck by the way in which she captured those feelings of frustration. She channels a well-worded rage at the ruling class, in this case focused on the treatment—socially, culturally, and environmentally—of Antigua.

This is a book about cricket, one of the enduring passions of my life.

Specifically it is about West Indian cricket and life in the author’s home of Trinidad. James was a Marxist intellectual, which is unusual for a cricketer. He writes eloquently and insightfully about cricket and some of its leading characters of 80 years ago. He writes about class and colour in both the Caribbean and England, where he played and reported on cricket for newspapers.

My interest has also been in the British Empire and its impact. The overriding impression this book left with me was the “Britishness” of the people of Trinidad; how much the people had imbibed it. So when many immigrated to Britain in the 1950s it felt like they were going ‘home’, only for many to be ostracised.

What happens when you shift your gaze to the sky? This ethnography of the Cuban sky finds surprising things there: cacti, pigeons, and the internet. The author of this beautifully illustrated ethno-fiction tells stories that make Cubans of today come alive in defiance of the usual clichés and stereotypes. 

I was both educated and enraged by Danticat’s grief story about the extensive immigrant injustices in this country and the entrenched systemic rights abuses. But the intimate family story at its core made this memoir one of my favorites. I was profoundly moved by her exquisite portrayal of her relationships with the two cherished men at the center of this book and her life—her father, Mira, and her uncle Joseph, a second father figure.

Danticat’s dedication to unravel the tragic string of circumstances that led to her uncle’s death in detention after he immigrated from Haiti only months before her father died from Pulmonary Fibrosis left me in awe. She demonstrates how, in retracing these circumstances, her book has become another kind of grief site for her personally and for the community. One that I have been grateful to visit to find companionship in loss.  

Eliot Bliss was a Jamaican born Anglo-Irish woman; she was also gay. Her stance as a Creole gay writer interests me. I also think she’s largely forgotten and should be read more. I related to her return to Jamaica (depicted in this novel) and her search for her sort of childhood home—that brings the realization that she both does and doesn’t fit in. She is white, she is gay so she doesn’t fit in British society where she feels out of place because of her Creole childhood and her sexuality, and she can’t fit in Jamaica because she is white and gay. And she sees clearly now the white oppressive colonials who were her family. It is a deeply felt search for home, both geographically but also in her body.

This has often been recommended for boys (including by me) but, since there is no such thing as exclusively boy books and girl books, I’m calling this a good book period – with a highly entertaining and deeply endearing adolescent-ish boy, surrounded by a robust cast of supporting characters, at its center. More vignettes than plot, it is rooted in character and voice – in this case, the rare and highly effective use of the second voice. Tonally, it’s a callback to the adventures of boyhood captured in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and the mostly harmless incorrigibility of the boy protagonist as he moves between home, school, and community (the community, in this case, being rural Jamaica), getting into trouble and growing up. It’s the heart and humour for me!

Who doesn’t love a good old-fashioned pirate romance? I read all of Linda Chaikin’s pirate books long before I even started writing. She is an excellent novelist who does impeccable research. Her characters are lovable, the ship scenes exciting, the romance invigorating, and well, the stories are just plain fun!  

This novel, told from a slave woman’s perspective, illuminates the time of maximal oppression in the slave colony of Jamaica, where White men sexually and physically abused enslaved Black women at whim. Lilith, the main character, came alive to me as her rage and despair grew with the multiple attacks on her body and spirit. 

It took me back to the anguish I felt discovering the journals of Thomas Thistlewood and his chronicling of close to 4,000 acts of rape carried out on his female Black slaves. When I visited Jamaica for the first time, I included Westmorland Parish as a stop. It was there that Thistlewood perpetrated his atrocities – an appalling example of the conditions under which enslaved women and girls lived during this period. 

This captivating novel draws its imagery and themes from Afro-Caribbean folklore, a refreshing change from the surfeit of Greek/Roman mythology-based stories. The MC, Tan-tan, is ripped from her comfortable life when her father forces her to join him in exile on a prison planet. In her struggle for survival on a brutal and lawless world, Tan-Tan’s greatest enemy proves to be her own father, an abusive monster. After she kills him in self-defense, Tan-tan finds refuge among the douen, an alien race drawn from Caribbean mythology. Here she evolves into a semblance of the Robber Queen of legend, and finds she can be free when she gives back two lives for the one that she took. Following Tan-tan as she makes an amazing journey from victim to hero makes this poetic novel an unforgettable read.

Kincaid’s voice and style, bracing and autobiographical, almost obsessive, rocked my world.

Hearing the insistence of her voice helped me discover my own voice and to embrace it. I love the compulsive presence in her work and the "I," whose power of personality, sensibility, and voice rushes through me.