by Lesley-Ann Brown (Repeater, 300 pp, ISBN 9781914420283)
No Black woman is asked to be a seer without sacrifice. For Brown, navigating the brutal morass of a United States in which Black men’s bodies are proven disposable, home felt further away than ever before. Then as a longtime resident of the archly titled “progressive Europe”, how would Brown confront a necessary return to Trinidad & Tobago for her grandmother’s funerary rites? Building on the authentic strengths of her creative non-fiction debut, Decolonial Daughter, the memoirist invites an equal tonal indomitability into her second book, while never short-changing herself or her readers on stunningly vulnerable scenes. These potent revelations — of thwarted domestic havens and ayahuasca-fuelled clarities — have both deep personal significance and profound universal resonance. To live both globally and with mindfulness: this is what Blackgirl on Mars radically achieves.
Copyright © MEP Publishers | Book buzz | Reviews (Jul/Aug 2023) | Caribbean Beat Magazinehttps://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-177/book-buzz-reviews-jul-aug-2023#ixzz8FBzZNlYa
The AmNews had had the pleasure of featuring Brown’s debut 2018’s “Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to Her European Son,” a visceral, touching book by a mother who shared her observations and wisdom to honor and acknowledge the evolution of her son’s life. Her long-awaited second book, “Blackgirl on Mars,” written while journeying through the United States during the height of the Black Lives Matters protests and finding herself in Trinidad and Tobago to lay her grandmother to rest, Brown gives her account of the existential reality of the maintenance of her own Black life within the realms of gender, sexuality, cultural connectivity and self-awareness. – Amsterdam News