Very well done, the writing, the characters the evolving mystery of the plot leads the reader through the story. ( )

Excellent novel so far. A good follow up to Just Kids because Chiandry's voice is as tender and careful as Smith's. ( )

This is the moving story of an unnamed narrator and his Caribbean-born mother, Adele. She recalls her life and early experiences as a visible-minority immigrant in Anglo-Saxon Toronto as well as her girlhood in Trinadad. Touchingly, Adele also suffers from early onset dementia and the retelling of her memories follow a logic of their own. This would be a good choice for fans of Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture or Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel.

This is a short novel about a young man who returns home to Scarborough (Ontario) to care for his mother. His mother suffers from early-onset dementia. His father has died, and his older brother is nowhere to be found. Our young narrator talks about his mother with compassion and perception.

As the book unfolds, we learn the mother's story. She grew up in Trinidad, near a U.S. army base. Her mother worked as a prostitute, and we see the effects this, along with racism and superstitution had on her. We come to see her dementia as, in part, necessary forgetting. There are things we have to leave behind if we are to make our lives work. And the cost of forgetting can be high -- in this case, on the mother's mental health.

Beautiful writing, thought-provoking. ( )

This is a thoughtfully written novel about the struggle between forgetting about trauma and moving on to a new life on one hand, and making the story of your trauma known, on the other. In Soucouyant, this theme is explored within the context of the immigrant, post-colonial experience.

After several years away from home, the unnamed narrator returns to the house where he grew up in Scarborough, Ontario, to care for his mother who is suffering from early onset dementia. Through their fragments of memories, he tries to piece together her early life in the Trinidad. The writing is powerful, and full of symbolism, which makes it a rewarding read for the careful reader. There is a lot going on in this short novel. ( )