Receiving her long-coveted visa to America, Patsy leaves behind her family in Jamaica only to discover that life as an undocumented immigrant is not what her best friend had described. By the award-winning author of Here Comes the Sun. - (Baker & Taylor)

Receiving her long-coveted visa to America, Patsy leaves behind her family in Jamaica, only to discover that life as an undocumented immigrant is not what her best friend had described. - (Baker & Taylor)

New York TimesPatsyherselfPatsyTime - (WW Norton)

A beautifully layered portrait of motherhood, immigration, and the sacrifices we make in the name of love from award-winning novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn. - (WW Norton)

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* When Patsy finally gets a U.S. travel visa in 1998, she is so sure that she is neither a good mother nor capable of becoming one that she plans to leave her young daughter, Tru, behind in Jamaica and never look back. There's something pulling Patsy, too, the promise of reunion with her girlhood best friend turned lover, Cicely, who left Jamaica a decade ago. But things quickly fall apart when Patsy arrives in Brooklyn to a less-welcoming situation than Cicely suggested in her letters. As Patsy survives the mind-numbing terror of undocumented life, stories from her past seep in to reveal her familiarity with hardship and a well of strength that is nonetheless invisible to her. Meanwhile, Tru deals with her own terror, suffering from her mother's abandonment while living with her father and his family, strangers to her at first. Ten years later, stoic teen Tru is almost undone by the loneliness of her gnawing depression and feelings of queerness, unaware that her mother, now a Manhattan nanny, shares both. Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun, 2016) builds big worlds inside and outside of her touchable characters, writing through their knotty love in all its failures and mercies in this empathic intergenerational epic of womanhood and inheritance. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

Author of the multi-best-booked, Lambda-graced, NYPL Young Lions finalist Here Comes the Sun, Dennis-Benn boldly crafts the story of a Jamaican woman named Patsy who joins oldest friend and secretly beloved Cicely in America while leaving behind both mother and daughter. With a seven-city tour.

Library Journal Reviews

Dennis-Benn's second novel (after Here Comes the Sun) is simultaneously about the immigrant experience, the complications of family ties, and sexual awakening. Patsy, a young Jamaican woman, immigrates to the United States to join her childhood best friend, Cecily, with whom she's always had a special bond. Although entering on a tourist visa, Patsy has no intention of returning, even though that means leaving her five-year old daughter, Tru, behind. Cecily's reception is not what Patsy expected, and she spends the next years struggling as an undocumented worker. Owing both to guilt and her lack of success in America, Patsy fails to stay in contact with Tru, who is wounded by her mother's abandonment and grows up wrestling with her own sexuality and gender expression. Near tragedy eventually leads each woman finally to come into her own. VERDICT This work shines as an example of how cultural specificity can highlight universal themes. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis