How to Love a Jamaican

The written word is a powerful thing. The now cliche Edward Bulwer-Lytton quote that “The pen is mightier than the sword” is well known by all. In the case of “How to Love a Jamaican” – the author’s pen is is the sword that has cut me apart while building me up and tickling me senseless all at the same time.

How to Love a Jamaican

Caribbean-themed Short Stories

How to Love a Jamaican is written by Alexia Arthurs an educated and award-winning Jamaican who moved to New York before she was a teenager. The book described simply, is a collection of short stories. It is fiction but seasoned to the bone with Caribbean flavour and nuance. As a younger man I was an avid reader – inhaling books as a teen, but somewhere in my early 20’s my love of reading and the fictional adventures reading carried me on waned. How to Love a Jamaican for me, was the first time in a long time I felt so excited and connected to a book/story, but instead of my usual Elves, dragons, superheroes, alien life forms and scientific theories it was me on the page, my neighbour, my family, my friends, my whole damn life and those around me.

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I’m in every story

Ever single short-story in the book is memorable but my favourites are “Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands”, “Mash Up Love”, “Mermaid River”, “Shirley from a Small Place” and the dagger to my heart and mind the title story “How to love a Jamaican”. Topics such a colourism, infidelity, love, arrogance are explored with characters so relate-able and real to any Caribbean person no matter their colour, class or creed. How to Love a Jamaican is a wonderful book that I can’t recommend enough. Thank you, Alexia. Thank you.

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How to Love a Jamaican

How to love a Jamaican is available on Amazon and other popular locations where books are sold.