pagesofjulia

After a great loss, a man returns to his mother’s homeland of Jamaica in this stunning novel of love, loss, grief, healing, art, identity, family and home.

Jamaican author Alecia McKenzie (Sweetheart) offers her readers delightful characters and thoughtful themes in A Million Aunties.

Chris seems to be running from something when he arrives in the Jamaican village of Port Segovia from New York City. In the opening chapter, “How to Paint Flowers,” his grief is gradually revealed: a woman, Lidia, now gone; Chris’s dark paintings; the impulse now toward light, as if to make up for what is lost. His friend and agent, Stephen, has sent him to Auntie Della in Port Segovia, promising, “You’ll have anything and everything you want. The whole range of tropical beauties: hibiscus, bird of paradise, bougainvillea.” Della owns a local nursery.

Just as readers settle into Chris’s pain and paintings, McKenzie shifts the focus. Chapter two is told from the point of view of Chris’s father, aging in Brooklyn. He worries about his son and their frayed relationship. Other chapters focus on other characters: Chris’s agent, Stephen, Jamaican by birth, who lives in New York; their friend Féliciane, a French artist who works with found objects; Uncle Alton, a painter in Kingston; Miss Pretty, Port Segovia’s local eccentric, who walks all day long in a fur coat. Chris was born in the United States, to a Black man from Alabama and a Jamaican woman. His father remembers first meeting her, and noting “the arrogance and confidence of growing up as a majority. The shortsightedness of it.”

Chris and Della are the heart of this story, but the kaleidoscope of other perspectives enriches it. Chris begins to heal from the loss of Lidia and even reconsider his relationship with his father, with the help of a new auntie and a broadening view of the world. The myriad characters offer a textured background to this central story. From rural Jamaica to New York City, Paris and the Firenzes of Alabama and Italy (Chris: “Firenze was always Firenze, never Florence”), and across generations, they share common threads: art, flowers, love, loss. “Painting flowers is political action,” Chris’s best-remembered teacher used to say. Now this seems to be all he can do for Lidia, who rearranged her life to devote it to flowers.

Stephen’s relationship with Auntie Della offers perhaps the novel’s central theme of human connection, built families: “In his most morbid moments, he sometimes thought: lose a mother, gain a million aunties.” A Million Aunties is an exquisite novel about beauty and pain, and what binds us together. Through captivating character studies, quiet lovely writing and deceptively simple storytelling, McKenzie illuminates basic commonalities and rethinks what family and home mean.

This review originally ran in the October 22, 2020 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: misc fiction, Shelf Awareness |