The narrator, Seth, is from a tight-knit Haitian family living here in Dorchester. In his view, Samona is a crazy girl with a weird family. Being from an African-American family, Samona thinks Seth's family is funny "cause we kiss each other on the cheek all the time instead of saying hello and we pray in French before we eat" (p. 5). Samona is responsible for embarrassing Seth publicly and getting him into trouble with his family. But of course he can't stay away from her. Much of the plot revolves around their exploits together or Seth's commentary on Samona' s adventures.
Samona Gemini and her whole family are lively characters. When Samona's sister, for example, found out her boyfriend was cheating on her, she "invited him over and made him an Alpo meat loaf since he was acting like such a dog" (p. 5). You have to love Mrs. Gemini, too. She is a poet and journalist who goes undercover. She plays the lottery, insisting that she was born lucky. "If I just focus my entire spiritual and mental being toward it-it will happen." (p. 51). She calls Seth "Young King" because she says he always looks like he has the burden of a kingdom on his shoulders. (p. 50). Although Seth repeatedly states that Samona is crazy, what really comes through is that she is her own person and she is loud about it. When Samona does show some interest in normal girl things, like entering the Little Miss Dorchester contest, she throws Seth off balance yet again, causing him to wonder if "normal" isn't boring.
Hyppolite is generous in her descriptions of Seth's family life. Seth's parents and grandparents use Creole expressions and Seth refers to his relatives with their Creole titles, like Monnonk Roddie (for Uncle Roddie) and Manmi (for mother). Seth's grandmother is a presence, too, adding to the religious feeling in Seth's household. When a death in the family occurs, readers get a close-up view of how this Haitian family copes. Hyppolite describes traditional foods, the wake, and the family gathering. Here is Seth's perspective on the events:
Our apartment was so crowded that Jean-Claude and I had to sleep on the floor in the living room. And it gets very tiring having to kiss a whole roomful of relatives good morning and good night and hello all the time. What's really tiring, though, was all the noise. They spent all day arguing politics about Haiti and nobody agreed about anything except that Haiti is in bad shape and something has to be done about it. (p. 43-44)
Although Seth's sister Chantal and his brother Jean-Claude both play important roles in the plot, they are flat characters. Jean-Claude is a street hero, committed to non-violence. Seth and the reader can count on him to say the political thing.
Half the time I have to tune Jean-Claude out when he's talking about how black people gotta unify and be strong and going on and on about what black person invented this and that. Sometimes it feels like I'm in school with him talking and talking. But today I understood what he was trying to do. He was trying to make sure I grew up proud. He was trying to teach me everything they didn't teach at school and not to believe everything you see on television and movies that doesn't show the good side of being black. (p. 82)
Chantal meanwhile sits at the center of conflicts in Seth's house. She is dating Jerome behind her parents' backs. She and Jean-Claude fight about this. The fact that Chantal lies to her parents is just one part of Jean-Claude's dislike for Jerome. Since Chantal sees Jerome on the sly, he doesn't appear in the book. Yet we learn that Jerome is African-American, that he grew up with his mom, and that he quit school last year and works full-time at the 7-Eleven near the highway. Foreshadowing the difficulties ahead, Seth reports:
I don't know exactly what to make of Jerome. The first time he came over to the house he had to wait for Chantal to finish washing the tub, so he started asking me all sorts of funny questions. Do I ever clean the tub? Does Chantal get good grades? Does she do all the housework? Does she get to stay out late like Jean-Claude? What does she want to be when she grows up?... I couldn't answer half the questions....Jerome didn't seem to like any of my answers. He didn't ask me any more questions but I heard him whisper "typical Caribbean" and something about sexism under his breath and I started to get mad." (p. 23)
Responsible as Seth seems to be in the book, set-ups like this and his attitude toward Samona make me question his reliability as a narrator.
I keep wondering if Hyppolite made the right decision in choosing Seth's perspective. Given that so many of the characters have energy and some depth, I might have liked the book even more if one of them had provided the narrative lens. On the other hand, Samona wouldn't work because then we'd have to learn about her self-doubts. She couldn't surprise us as readily. None of the adults would work because they would have their own concerns and a much more limited window into the kids' world. Only a peer of Samona's situated in a Haitian family could give us such a broad view. Only a boy could raise questions for himself and for readers that bring up issues like gender equality without becoming preachy.
A strong point of the book is its range of interesting issues that lend themselves to a class discussion or book group. Besides the issue of gender equality, the novel creates opportunities for discussion of dating and greeting customs, the choice to conform or not, conflict resolution, and to some extent the tensions between and different values found in the African-American and Haitian communities. Although I feel vaguely dissatisfied by the book, I think its good points outweigh my qualms. I like Hyppolite's style and I'll be looking for her next book. She's young, born in Haiti in 1969, so I'll be curious to see whether she'll stick with young adult fiction or move on to a different genre. I wonder who her next narrative voice will be. I hope she'll set another book in Dorchester.