Review by Booklist Review
British cartoonist and illustrator Kennedy presents a collection of 10 short stories influenced by his Black Caribbean ethnicity. Spanning various twentieth-century decades and locales, the stories introduce a West Indies immigrant trying to sell apples for his father, a Caribbean shape-shifting ligahoo, a woman with yellow fever being infected by the spores of psychedelic mushrooms, a boy growing into a man in Birmingham, England, who can't seem to escape his past, and a person at loose ends observing the injustices around them. Kennedy's artwork has a dark ink-on-paper feel similar to that found in many periodical cartoons, but the limited use of color throughout the stories, whether as a pop in a single element or a wash over the entire frame, adds to the context of the theme: green and red for the story titled "Green Men," where the protagonist is selling apples, and yellow for "Yellow Bird Blues," where the protagonist is suffering from yellow fever. This collection will appeal most to readers who enjoy thought-provoking social commentary.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dislocation and unfulfilled dreams haunt this ragged yet affecting debut collection from New Yorker cartoonist Kennedy. With a blocky style that alternates between immersive chaos and wider scenes of emptiness, Kennedy's storytelling is loose, fanciful, and at times hard to grasp. The 10 stories span decades, oceans, and even solar systems but are linked by the longing for home. Kennedy's semi-dazed wanderers and dreamers traverse the cold damp "bleak" of England's Midlands, where Caribbean emigrants of the Windrush generation face nativist hate and loneliness; 1920s Louisiana, where a ghostly folk tale has the cutting rawness of an undiscovered Delta blues masterpiece; and a faraway planet where even interstellar exploration cannot escape the stain of colonialism. There are fitful references to resistance, as in the callout to dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's "Inglan is a Bitch" and a woman's declaration of postcolonial optimism ("Damn right, the Irish, the Africas, next the Indies... all the rapers and the pillagers can get stuffed!"). But despite all the talking animals, spirits, and shape-shifting, Kennedy's vision maintains a gritty, true-to-life understanding of the perpetually in-between state of diasporic peoples. This dreamy and embittered work lays bare the challenges of living in an inequitable world. (Feb.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
