A House For Miss Pauline

Jamaican writer McCaulay (Daylight Come) draws on her mixed-race ancestry and her country’s legacy of slavery for this convoluted tale of a community roiled by a land claim. As a preteen in the 1930s, Pauline Sinclair is transfixed by the ruins of a Portuguese plantation house in the bush outside her village of Mason Hall. Years later, Pauline builds a sturdy house for her family with limestone salvaged from the plantation. In 1987, an American named Turner Bachman arrives in Mason Hall, claiming he’s the rightful heir to the plantation along with the land occupied by Pauline and her neighbors. He sells thousands of acres to a developer before he mysteriously disappears. Now, as Pauline’s 100th birthday approaches and she reflects on the past in conversations with her granddaughter Justine (“You ever tink about it, Jussy? How we come to be yah so? How a whiteman jus’ pitch up in Mason Hall an decide sey this is him land”), the circumstances behind Turner’s disappearance gradually come to light. McCaulay keenly evokes a sense of place, but the characterizations of Pauline and Justine are inconsistent and the payoff to the mystery of Turner’s fate disappoints. This one doesn’t quite hang together. Agent: Laetitia Rutherford, Watson, Little. (Feb.)