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A review by abrooklynbookshelf
Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn
3.0
as a queer jamaican who spends a lot of time thinking about mother/daughter relationships, i wanted to love this book so much. it’s a book i’ve been excited about for so long, but unfortunately i found that i just wasn’t excited while reading it. it often felt cheesy, a little melodramatic, and too long. by the end, i was kind of just waiting for it to be over.
while reading patsy, i was always so cognizant of the fact that i was reading a story, a work of fiction. it felt like there was so much exposition, so much tell and not much show. i didn’t feel like the relationships had any depth or were believeable. everything felt very surface level, and even major moments were passed over in one paragraph or a matter of pages. i went in so ready to fall into a story and found that it kept me at arm’s length the entire time.
i did think a lot about the patois while i was reading. i do wonder what about the experience of this book is different for someone who is not familiar with patois, and if that changes the perception of what the relationships between characters feels like. i also wondered a lot about how i subconsciously experienced this book as someone for whom patois is a very familiar language, but while also recognizing that this is actually the first time i’ve ever extensively read anything in patois.
patsy had so much potential, and i think if it had gone deeper rather than stretching wider it would have been so much more successful. glad i read it, but more than a bit sad about my feelings toward it.
while reading patsy, i was always so cognizant of the fact that i was reading a story, a work of fiction. it felt like there was so much exposition, so much tell and not much show. i didn’t feel like the relationships had any depth or were believeable. everything felt very surface level, and even major moments were passed over in one paragraph or a matter of pages. i went in so ready to fall into a story and found that it kept me at arm’s length the entire time.
i did think a lot about the patois while i was reading. i do wonder what about the experience of this book is different for someone who is not familiar with patois, and if that changes the perception of what the relationships between characters feels like. i also wondered a lot about how i subconsciously experienced this book as someone for whom patois is a very familiar language, but while also recognizing that this is actually the first time i’ve ever extensively read anything in patois.
patsy had so much potential, and i think if it had gone deeper rather than stretching wider it would have been so much more successful. glad i read it, but more than a bit sad about my feelings toward it.