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02882aam a2200301 i 4500 001 2678FAD6D31F11EBBEBA4D2145ECA4DB 003 SILO 005 20210622010013 008 191101s2020 enk 000 j eng d 010 $a 2020418200 020 $a 9781845234799 020 $a 1845234790 035 $a (OCoLC)1125356549 040 $a YDX $b eng $e rda $c YDX $d OCLCQ $d UKMGB $d OCLCO $d OCLCF $d YDXIT $d STF $d OCLCO $d DLC $d PAU $d TOH $d IOU $d SILO 082 04 $a 813.6 $2 23 100 1 $a Gayle, Wandeka, $e author. 245 10 $a Motherland and other stories / $c Wandeka Gayle. 264 1 $a Leeds : $b Peepal Tree Press Ltd, $c 2020. 300 $a 178 pages ; $c 21 cm 505 00 $t Prodigal. $t Finding Joy -- $t The Wish -- $t Walker Woman -- $t Help Wanted -- $t Court Room 5 -- $t Melba -- $t The Blackout -- $t Birdie -- $t Reunion -- $t Prodigal. 520 $a Wandeka Gayle's mostly young black women protagonists win our hearts as risk-taking, adventurous explorers of the white world, away from home, which at some point has been Jamaica. They include Roxanne, who starts work in a care home in London and strikes up a rapport with a depressed old man who used to be a writer; Ayo, who heads to college in Louisiana and fights off the internalised voice of her godly, tambourine-beating aunt to begin an affair with an engaging, slightly older white man; there's Sophia, who comes to work in Georgia and struggles to know whether her inability to engage more deeply with other people is really about racism or, rather, a more personally embedded reluctance. What characterises these women is a readiness to encounter, an attempt to get to grips with the oddities and strangeness of the white world, and like Ayo, to engage with it, whilst being pretty sure that Forrest "could never understand her world." They take risks and are sometimes forced to pay for their courage. Other characters have to confront situations of their own making, like Angela returning from the USA for her mother's funeral, trying to find some point of contact with the now almost grown children she abandoned, or Melba who, after her husband dies, must confront the silence she has permitted in their marriage. The situations that Wandeka Gayle writes about are the stuff of everyday life, but she writes with such an empathy, grace, and acute psychological understanding that one cannot but engage with her characters. There's an easy democracy of inwardness with them, too; she is as much at home with the ill-educated, apparently ambitionless, and illiterate as with a sophisticated lecturer like Michel meeting up with an old flame at a literary conference. 650 0 $a Women, Black $v Fiction. 655 7 $a Fiction. $2 lcgft 941 $a 2 952 $l OVUX522 $d 20231117022651.0 952 $l BAPH771 $d 20210622010908.0 956 $a http://locator.silo.lib.ia.us/search.cgi?index_0=id&term_0=2678FAD6D31F11EBBEBA4D2145ECA4DB 994 $a C0 $b IOUInitiate Another SILO Locator Search