![]() ![]() They believed they would be able to provide their children with enormous opportunities. Michael studies her for clues to who he is and where he is from.īrother describes a cohort of Caribbean immigrants who settled in Toronto in the 1960s and ’70s. Ruth serves as umbilical cord to the Caribbean and African past. And in Chariandy’s book, Ruth’s ferocious determination that her boys succeed contributes to Francis’s growing alienation from his family. In her memoir Kincaid painstakingly analyzes her relationship with her controlling mother. But the reappearance of an old girlfriend forces Michael to contemplate the racism and police brutality that derailed his big brother’s life. Michael and Ruth keep to themselves, still traumatized by Francis’s violent death. The Toronto suburb is home to immigrants of colour, struggling to raise families on minimum wage jobs. ![]() The boys’ parents are Trinidadian: their mother, Ruth is black their absent father, South Asian. ![]() He cares for their mother in the same gray, dilapidated Scarborough, Ontario, complex in which they were raised. The narrator, Michael, is Francis’s 20-something brother. When the story opens, Francis has been dead 10 years. So, too, it is with Chariandy’s latest novel, in which an air of mystery surrounds the narrator’s older brother, Francis, especially the nature of his relationship with his best friend. ![]()
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