Black Rock (2009) is a novel by Irish-Trinidadian author Amanda Smyth. Like her other novel, Lime Tree Can’t Bear Orange, this book was of the 25 Must Read Books of Summer by Oprah Winfrey. Smyth’s lyrical style has been described as matching “the lushness of a tropical landscape with the rhythms of island life.”
Set in 1950s Tobago, the protagonist of this coming-of-age novel, Celia, lives with her Aunt Tassi in Black Rock, Tobago, with her twin cousins Violet and Vera and Tassi’s second husband Roman, a man so sly he could crawl under a snake’s belly on stilts. Everyone knows Roman is a bad man, but Tassi felt so lucky to have found someone willing to take on another man’s children and her dead sister’s child that she latched onto him like a raft in the sea. But Celia thinks that Roman is the devil, and when one day he does something that proves her right, Celia can’t bear to share a roof with him for even one more night. She leaves that night and takes a boat to Trinidad, in search of her future. But her journey away will lead her paradoxically back to a past that has been shrouded in secrecy and lies. The eponymous rock is given to Celia by a clairvoyant, Mrs. Jeremiah, who assures her it “will keep bad luck at bay and save you from the hard life you will make for yourself.”
In her review of Black Rock, Anita Sethi explains: Smyth evocatively shows more than she tells. Not only people but place exerts a powerful force. Helen Rodriguez cannot feel at home in Trinidad, to her a “hell on earth.” The knowledge of her husband’s infidelity unhinges Helen, who vacillates between seeming a “proper English rose” and a “wandering ghost.” [. . .] There are echoes of the archetypal “mad woman”, if not in an attic then in a marital room in the Caribbean, with scenes reminiscent of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Smyth ties up her loose ends rather too neatly, but this is a vivid and compelling story, exploring the extent of our control over our destinies.
For book description and purchasing information, see http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/amanda-smyth/black-rock.htm
For full review by Anita Sethi, see http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/black-rock-by-amanda-smyth-1654796.html
