In her much-anticipated follow-up to 2016’s Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn observes how a woman’s identity—female, black, queer—can inform her status in different ways depending on the context. In Jamaica, Patsy is the mother of a young daughter, capable of finding steady work yet under threat of domestic violence and entrenched stereotypes rooted in colonialism. Undocumented in New York, she is subjected to classism and heartbreak—working as a nanny while losing touch with her own daughter back home, and spurned by a past love. Dennis-Benn undercuts expectations of how immigration and mother-daughter stories take shape and resolve, updating frequently oversimplified narratives for 2019.
Buy now: Patsy