![]() ![]() “Ye need te pull yeself together, Harlem," is his mother’s ongoing refrain. ![]() Then there is the story of Harlem Jones, whose West Indian immigrant mother wants him to make more of his life than his absent father and incarcerated brother have managed to do with theirs since the family settled in London. In the deeply haunting “David,” the lives of two Sudanese women living in Australia intersect: one is older, more traditional, and still traumatized by the shooting of her young child in the war back home the other is a younger, more modern single mom who has just left her son’s father because he “was no good.” Here, the gap between generations that, at first, gives the older woman a negative judgment of the younger woman’s life choices gives way to a single, cathartic moment of human connection. ![]() In the title story, Millie Lucas, a pretty teenage girl from a poor Jamaican farming family, is sent to work in a Kingston sewing shop, which her parents see as a step up in the world for her, only to fall victim to a man's seduction. In this aptly named story collection by Clarke ( The Hate Race, 2016), an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean heritage, people living in various countries struggle to build better lives for themselves. ![]()
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