Buxton Spice

We tottered on to the road and set off. My legs felt like matchsticks with huge weights on the ends. Looked ridiculous, but was rollerskates and we had them first. The sound of hard plastic on the gritty asphalt cleared the cool night air for us to come sailing through. Up and down the road. Past the fellars watching.

Buxton Spice is not, however, a mere exercise in dirty dancing. It includes many fine bits of small-town portraiture, such as this quick take on a Portuguese store-owner: "Ricardo was pink and meticulous. When he was sober he had a slow solid way of moving and hardly spoke in the house. Slept in the shop. His clothes had to match." There are also oblique lessons in Guyana's politics and caste system. What's missing, perhaps, is a sense of narrative drive: Kempadoo puts her characters on their appointed paths but seldom manages much in the way of collision. Still, her book is an auspicious and utterly distinctive slice of small-town life. What's more, it has the ring of truth to it: this, we're persuaded, is Lula's song of experience, battery-powered as it may be. --James Marcus

Product Description
Back in print: an extraordinary first novel by "a writer to watch and to enjoy."*

Told in the voice of a girl as she moves from childhood into adolescence, Buxton Spice is the story the town of Tamarind Grove: its eccentric families, its sweeping joys, and its sudden tragedies. The novel brings to life 1970s Guyanaa a world at a cultural and political crossroadsa and perfectly captures a child's keen observations, sense of wonder, and the growing complexity of consciousness that marks the passage from innocence to experience.

"A superb, and superbly written, novel of childhood and childhood's end . . . Kempadoo writes in a rich Creole, filling her story with kaleidoscopic images of Guyana's coastal plains . . . Her story is also one of sexual awakening, and she explores these new feelings with a curiosity and freedom that are refreshing . . . Kempadoo's novel, like the Buxton Spice mango tree, reveals its secrets, private and political, only sparingly until the bitter end."
a Patrick Markee, New York Times Book Review

"Oonya Kempadoo . . . has written a sexy, stirring, richly poetic semi-autobiographical first novel."
a Gabriella Stern, Wall Street Journal

"As juicy and ripe as the fruits drooping from the Buxton Spice mango tree . . . Kempadoo's Caribbean argot is precise and fluid, enriching this debut with bawdiness, violence, and raucous humor."
a Los Angeles Times

"There is a salt freshness to Kempadoo's writing, an immediacy which makes the reader catch breath for pleasure at the recognition of something exactly observed . . . She is a writer to watch and to enjoy, for her warmth, her fine intelligence and her striking use of language."
a Paula Burnett, The Independent (London)*