The Pain Tree
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The Pain Tree tells stories that speak to all aspects of Jamaican life. Among the characters we hear from are: poor folk making the best of past hardships (“Coal”); rich folk plotting future selfishness (“The Goodness of My Heart”); an old man, familiar with darkness, who discovers in foreign capitalism a force even he cannot control (“Boxed-In”); a young girl, uprooted to a new country, forced to shoulder her mother’s unspoken burdens in addition to her own (“Lollipop”). Bookending these are two powerful stories about the inextricability of home and history: in “The Pain Tree,” the protagonist comes to realize the love she has abandoned, and the pain she has left behind; in “Flying,” the lead character, searching for that which has been missing most of his life, comes home for good.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection of short fiction from Senior is a beautiful if uneven assemblage. Though her prose prowess is always on exquisite display, there are tonal and thematic miscues in stories such as "The Pain Tree" and "Coal," in which character depth is unusually absent and the interracial interactions one of the central components of the collection come across as forced and stereotyped. Those flaws are somewhat baffling, given the author's personal connection to the stories' subject matter and her use of Jamaican culture and history as the basis for her work. Other stories in the collection don't falter when engaging similar concerns. "Boxed-In" and "The Country Cousin" vacillate between effectiveness and slippage for their own reasons, and "Moonlight" and "A Father Like That" aren't strong enough for what else is represented. But other stories, such as "Silent," "The Goodness of My Heart," "Lollipop," and "Flying," all soar. Even with its occasional failings, this collection is well worth reading.
