Published in 2022, this is Charmaine Wilkerson's debut novel.

My audio-version was narrated by Lynnette Freeman and Simone McIntyre.

On balance, I enjoyed the story. Even in the audio-format, it wasn't too difficult to cope with the very short sections, which involve lots of jumping around among timelines and perspectives. And we open with a dramatic event that engages our interest.

The perspective then shifts to two estranged siblings, Caribbean Americans Byron and Benedetta (Benny) Bennett. He's a successful oceanologist; she's a wandering soul, struggling with her sexuality and with her goals in life. She feels rejected by her family, and hasn't had anything to do with her brother in eight years or so. Now Mum, Eleanor Bennett, has died, leaving them a black cake (traditional island fare) in the freezer, and a long audio-recording that reveals the many, many things they didn't know about their mother's life.

On the positive side of the ledger:

-- I liked the mystery. Who did kill Little Man back in 1965, on that unnamed Caribbean island, after young Covey is forced to marry him? And who is Covey anyway?

-- I liked the depiction of the life of immigrants (both the Chinese on this island, and the Caribbeans in London).

-- I liked the depiction of the family dynamics (mum and dad want the best for their kids, but don't always succeed in understanding and supporting moves that diverge from their interpretation of "best").

-- I liked the central premise: That families are riddled with secrets.


The Caribbean is beyond my ken, but here's another tropical island with interesting swimming possibilities: Bali, 2010

On the negative side:

-- I found the book crazily over-stuffed... I'm going to quote Tate DeCaro here, as she sums up exactly what I thought: "This could have been such a powerful story about family, ancestry, and generational trauma. Instead I felt a sense of loss when, about 1/3 of the way through, the narrative spun out into too many characters, and so many brief inclusions of 'important social issues' that the plot started to lose shape! Arranged marriage, forced adoption, domestic violence and rape, racism, gender and race discrimination, workplace discrimination, pollution, police brutality, gambling... And there isn't a single one that gets more than a few pages' worth of attention. It's like Wilkerson decided that each chapter needed a controversial social issue to keep the story relevant. Instead, it bogged the story down entirely..."

-- While Eleanor Bennett's generation was peopled by fascinating characters (Eleanor herself, who is forced to reconstruct her identity from the bottom up, and lives in fear of discovery all her life; her mother, who ran away from her Chinese father and his gambling problem; Pearl, the black-cake-baking domestic help who became Eleanor's surrogate mother; Bunny, Eleanor's friend and a pioneering long-distance swimmer...), the characters from the next generation all seemed a bit generic, and I couldn't summon up much interest in their problems with relationships and careers...

-- There were just way too many coincidences... Call me sceptical, but I just can't believe -- even in the internet age -- that all these people would have managed to find each other in all these miraculous ways. So the resolution felt somehow contrived.



***

Liberty Martin regrets that the island, which she suspects is Jamaica, is not identified: "The missing island name becomes a black hole that renders the emotional weight of identity and diaspora hollow. Whenever Eleanor bakes black cake for her children, she tells them, 'This is your heritage.' What kind of heritage does not have a name?... Imbuing Black Cake with the specificity of Jamaica could have enriched the novel’s eventful, multi-generational narrative with compelling questions about race, ethnicity, and immigration. For instance, what are the differences between the Black experiences of Jamaican immigrants and African Americans? What does it mean that Benny and Byron are 'an African American family of Caribbean origin'? As the biracial daughter of a Chinese business owner, Eleanor would likely be classed as 'brown' while growing up in the anglophone Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s -- how did she navigate becoming Black when moving to the UK and the US? Instead of analyzing the politics about race that are already within the ingredients of the story, Wilkerson limits herself to the rigid ways that mainstream media recognizes anti-Blackness."

I think that's the problem with the book more generally: There's so much in it that there's no room to explore any of the issues and their implications in depth.