Jacqueline Grant Kent

I received a copy of this book as part of the Librarything Early Reviewer program.

“The Not-So-Sweet History of Caribbean Sugar” is a middle-grade reader describing the relationship between sugar production and slavery in the Caribbean.

It gives a good description of the production methods and the personal costs to slaves of the process. It doesn’t quite convey the significance of sugar to the purchasing economies.

I road-tested this book on a pair of well-read 10-year-olds. They found it informative but not greatly engaging.… (mehr)

Dancing on the Day of Kings paints a portrait of festival life in Spanish occupied Cuba. Like Mardi Gras in the US, the Christian feast of the Epiphany was used by the oppressed to celebrate their own stolen cultures in a society that offered them little to live for. Grant's chapbook concentrates on the celebration, but drops enough hints that life in pre-Revolutionary Cuba was not the paradise that modern "exiles" claim it was - it was a country with all the same injustices and disparity as all others.

From the style and length of the book, it's apparent that it was written for schoolchildren, and would benefit from some illustration to pad out the nine pages of content, but apart from that it's a nice little read and would be a good starting off point for a class on Cuba, slavery, and the role of religion in controlling the lives of the oppressed.… (mehr)