Episode 8 | How The One Armed Sister Sweeps Her Home - Cherie Jones (Barbados)

BCLF Cocoa Pod

A Good Morning America Bookclub pick and translated into several languages, How The One Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones is a perfectly paced novel well-lit with characterisation and descriptiveness. This moderately-sized novel swells and grows to a point in the final chapters where at times it feels like the words are flying off the pages to the accelerated beating of your own heart. It is a story that twists and turns, through a single dominant plot - solving the murder of Peter Whalen; it is carried in the underbellies of the lives of all its characters with signposts of life in Barbados that we, regrettably, do not see more often. It is ripe and rife with metaphor. Barbados’ limestone topograghies become powerful allegories for the hidden secrets of personal and island histories, the vulnerabilities of human nature, relationships and the exploration of many types of love.
Cherie Jones’ story unfolds through her characters. Entire chapters are named after them and are often written from the point of view of what does not happen. We meet each, flawed, in relentless pursuit of happiness and a higher self or away from an oppressive past. Each character we meet is hungry for liberation.
Without being didactic, Jones treats with the other side of paradise, the human collateral, the physical, psychological and emotional damage on those whose lives are given to creating an idyllic paradise for others stretching all the way back from the Caribbean’s years as crown colonies to its present day SunSeaSand playground for the First World.
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