Book Review: How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones is my first novel by a Caribbean writer featured on my blog. Set in the tourists´ ´Paradise´ of Barbados at the end of the 1970s-beginning of the 1980s it is mostly a violent story of women survival and darkness. In terms of local history, it is a time of increase of the number of travellers, including men and women looking for some recreational sex and low-paid excitements. 

It is mostly a world of white people ruling with their money and privilege the majority of locals fighting with poverty and day-by-day survival. Out of them, the women are at the same time the strongest and the most affected by all those changes, the breadwinners and the target of the random or regular outbursts of hate and anger from the impovershed, precarious men. 

The novel starts with a story transmitted from a woman to another about what happens to girls that disobey their mothers. All of the women featured - Mira, Lala, Wilma - did take at a certain moment in their life a brave decision. Even a wrong decision of marrying a certain man is brave because it involved a risk but nevertheless a personal decision. The Barbados featured in this book has little to do with the glossy image of the listicles featured in the influencers posts. And so it´s the way in which some of the tourists themselves see Barbados: ´It is not like they say in the magazines, the tourist tells the newspaper, these people are still like savages´. It is a world of gigolos, drug dealers, armed robberies, prostitution and corruption. As a touch of authenticity, there are dialogues in local dialects.

But first and foremost, it is a world where women are always at risk. Risk of murder, violence, abuse. Their married - or relationship - lives are, like in the case of Lala, a suite of ´existing and remembered injuries´. The descriptions are vivid and powerful, outlined by perceptive observations. There are different points of view and voices in the novel, which complete each other´s story while adding elements of their own that may or may not match the big narrative. The author´s voice is distant, slow-paced yet wordsmitten, strong enough to allow a certain direction of the story in a less obvious way.

Beyond the geographical novelty, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House was a revelation of a very serious writer with a strength of her own which should write more. Can´t wait for her next book.  

Rating: 4.5 stars