Frying Plantain

January 27, 2020
In Reid-Benta’s heartfelt debut collection of linked stories, a girl grows up in Toronto while coming to terms with her heritage. On a trip to Jamaica at age 10, Kara screams after finding a pig’s severed head in her great-aunt’s icebox. Back home, she brags to her classmates that she was the one who slaughtered it. Each story introduces a new uncomfortable situation while advancing along the timeline of Kara’s life. In “Snow Day,” Kara tries on a patois (“Yuh run yuh mouth too much”) and receives taunts from her middle school peers for “Ja-fakin’ it.” In “Lovely,” she lands her first job and loses her virginity at 17. In “Celebration,” Kara and her mother, Eloise, get drunk together for the first time on the eve of her high school graduation, while in “Drunk,” she and her friends party harder, leading to Kara throwing up in front of Eloise. Along the way, strong characters emerge, including Eloise, a sharp, overbearing woman who wants nothing more than to see her daughter succeed; and Kara’s churchgoing grandmother, Nana, who shows her affection through cooking for the whole family. Reid-Benta makes good use of the episodic form, artfully blending Kara’s wit and distance with startling vulnerability as she tracks Kara’s thought processes and desires. This heralds a notable new voice.

Starred review from February 15, 2020
Though Kara was born in Canada, her family is Jamaican, living in Toronto's Little Jamaica section. These 12 interrelated stories examine Kara's life from when she was 10, and deemed too soft by her grandmother, to age 19, when she is a university student. While most of the stories are told in Kara's first-person voice, sharing slices of life, her mother and grandmother loom large. Both women are highly opinionated and short-tempered, their relationship fraught with angry altercations, which Kara faithfully records, noting that peace could only exist in this family when we lied about everything, at least to each other. She is a natural storyteller, as when, at 10, she recounts to her rapt classmates having seen a pig's frozen head while on a trip to Jamaica. The experience becomes more elaborate with each retelling. Many of her stories, however, are low-key, recounting coming-of-age moments: her first kiss, her first experience of sex, to which she submits, she writes, to know if she can feel anything. Like Kara, Reid-Benta is a natural storyteller; her prose is straightforward and unadorned except, perhaps, when she shares the grandmother's voice in its use of Jamaican patois. Her characterizations are acute, bringing her characters to vivid life. Her first book, this splendid collection marks her as a writer to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)