My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was curious when she finished the first section of the text and her brother had finally died what she could possibly conceive to round out the remainder of the pages. I thought to myself “what more is there to tell”. This title was engaging, insightful, and reflective upon the interactions that occur between parents, children, and siblings in the course of coming of age into our vast adulthood.
This might have just as easily been about my relationship with either of my brothers Tony or Rahsaan or even my sister Danielle for at one point we thought we knew one another and then suddenly we grew and we found we didn’t know each other that well at all anymore. Still we are family and we do have this thing we are searching through inside of ourselves called “love” appropriately. It is a word difficult to define and death causes us to face and figure out the workings of its pieces.
Death. I have wondered to myself how I would encounter and move my way around it. For as much as I could not understand Jamaica’s feelings towards her family, she used a tactic that I imagine I might also (and have) use when tackling an issue as piercing as death. Writing through it. The largest part of the text is a reflective first person dialogue around the subject of death and her reactions to it as she discovers more each day the brother whom she never really knew.