Paradise Once: A Novel [Hardcover]

Olive Seniors? The Caribbean imagined in Olive Seniors new novel, In? Olive Senior gifts us an incisive view of our Ta?no world at contact. I welcome this emerging literature . . . we need it. The former poet laureate of Jamaica and Writers Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award winner takes on the myth of Ta?no extinction in this highspirited and riveting tale inspired by a massacre by Spanish forces in 1513 Cuba . . . Exquisitely researched and deftly written, its a vivid recreation of the origin of Caribbean culture through its resistance fighters known by history as Maroons. A bittersweet ode to a paradise lost and a people forced to transform to survive, Senior is particularly deft at exploring social class, maternal terrain, and distance. The territory she writes about could not interest this reader more . . . Senior skillfully depicts the space between mother and children. . . Whats remarkable at times is Seniors subtle depiction of family tension, the prodding between mother and daughter, the apprehension of what the one does or mainly does not know of the other. At every level of her stories constructions, Senior works deftly . . . dealing with open palms in the deep wells of remembrance, ancestry, and a crosshatch of colonizing scars, this fiction looks face-upwards to the mountains of multiple Jamaicas for hope, home, and daily bread. The entire future of Caribbean prose is mapped out in this collection of stories, and I dont know a single Caribbean writer who doesnt reread it often.