Set in India, England, Trinidad and St Lucia, Love the Dark Days follows the story of a girl, Poppet, born of mixed Hindu-Muslim parentage in post-independence India. Growing up in silk-swathed splendour and with her grandmother's prejudices of class and race, she is also the dark child in her family, a feeling of unbelonging repeated when her family migrates to multicultural Trinidad, meeting Indian people, several generations away from India, with a very different sense of themselves. She begins writing about her experiences as a way of trying to make sense of them. In her darkest hour, she meets Derek Walcott, who encourages her to leave the past behind and reinvent herself. All this takes place in a society suffering an attempted coup by Muslim extremists and a rising crime rate with reported incidents of spectacular brutality. Can Poppet, through her writing, examine each broken shard of her shattered family relations and reassemble it into a new shape in a new world? Can she make sense of herself in relation both to her own family and the Trinidadian family she marries into, and grow enough to achieve the courage it takes simply to be human? Raw, unflinching, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days is an intricate tapestry that has Poppet's story at its heart.
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I would like to see a kite in the blank blue sky.ONE, KELLY VILLAGE, TRINDAD, 2000
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(@peepaltreepress, 7 July 2022, e-book, 232 pages, copy from @PoeticBookTours, #BlogTour 12 October)
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I enjoyed Love the Dark Days even though I rarely read memoir-type books by writers I don't know. The chapters alternate between the author's past and childhood and the relationship she develops with Derek Walcott. I preferred the chapters about the author's past and childhood a lot more. They were well-written, engaging and I liked the blend of happy and sad. There are dark moments in the book, but they are beautifully written and insightful. I wasn't overly fond of the chapters about Derek Walcott as the author seemed to swan and preen over him. I quickly read these to back to the parts I enjoyed. I enjoyed this book a lot.