A House for Miss Pauline
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Starring an unforgettably fierce ninety-nine-year-old Jamaican heroine, this “profound and beautiful novel” transports readers to the heart of rural Jamaica with a tender and urgent story about who owns the land on which our identities are forged (Julia Alvarez).
When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jamaican writer McCaulay (Daylight Come) draws on her mixed-race ancestry and her country's legacy of slavery for this convoluted tale of a community roiled by a land claim. As a preteen in the 1930s, Pauline Sinclair is transfixed by the ruins of a Portuguese plantation house in the bush outside her village of Mason Hall. Years later, Pauline builds a sturdy house for her family with limestone salvaged from the plantation. In 1987, an American named Turner Bachman arrives in Mason Hall, claiming he's the rightful heir to the plantation along with the land occupied by Pauline and her neighbors. He sells thousands of acres to a developer before he mysteriously disappears. Now, as Pauline's 100th birthday approaches and she reflects on the past in conversations with her granddaughter Justine ("You ever tink about it, Jussy? How we come to be yah so? How a whiteman jus' pitch up in Mason Hall an decide sey this is him land"), the circumstances behind Turner's disappearance gradually come to light. McCaulay keenly evokes a sense of place, but the characterizations of Pauline and Justine are inconsistent and the payoff to the mystery of Turner's fate disappoints. This one doesn't quite hang together.
