A House for Miss Pauline

"So A House for Miss Pauline is about a character, Pauline Sinclair, who is close to her 100th birthday and has lived in Jamaica her whole life. The walls of her house begin to shake and speak to her. Again, it’s a story where you wonder, ‘Is this an adventure?’ And then it grips you. It takes you not too far in terms of physical distance—around her plantation, to various little towns on Jamaica—but emotionally it takes you thousands of miles to places that you would never have dreamed of. Miss Pauline is phenomenal. She’s basically been through almost everything you can in Jamaica, as a native Jamaican. She’s been a ganja farmer. She has studied literature. She has been through the struggles of religion in a male-dominated world and pushed against all the social norms. This story is about her wanting to find out the truth about where she’s from, and to explain the truth about what’s happened to her and what she’s done in the past. Initially, her thinking is that she needs to protect her land and home, but in the end, it comes all the way back around again. It’s a phenomenally emotional and enlightening story. An important aspect of the book is that it uncovers the slavery trade and some of Jamaica’s origins. As Miss Pauline knows she’s close to the end of her life, she seeks to explain what may have happened to a certain American, a white man, who came to take back the land that she’d built a house on and lived on for her whole life. So she reaches out to his relatives, some of whom live on the island, some don’t. They all come together, and it’s a journey of discovery. They find out that they are all interconnected in a family relationship, and that this land is hers in the first place because of this longevity and these interconnections that go all the way back to the slavery trade. So it’s an amazing, really powerful book. Parts of it are written in patois, which for me was initially quite challenging—to understand when Miss Pauline is talking. But I listened to the audiobook and got the rhythm of it, and then the book just flowed. It’s a beautiful, beautiful book."