It's simply a stark exposition of a global corporate culture that treats people as things. I liked the ending of the novel. No magic solutions were offered. No battle cry was raised. But there was change. The kind of change that comes from people talking to each other about their past and their present and doing what they can to claim and keeps their identity and their dignity. I strongly recommend the audiobook version of 'Fingerprints Of Previous Owners'.
All the narrators do a great job, especially in bringing the rhythms of the language to life. Leo Walsh. Author 3 books 52 followers. We Americans forget that African slaves the United States represented a sliver of the total transported to the New World.
Most were employed in the Carribean and South American, harvesting sugar cane and extracting other labor-intensive raw materials to make their owners rich. Rebecca Entel traces the residue of slavery in a small Carribean community in Fingreprints of Previous Owners.
The book's main character, Myrna, is passive, shadowy, and submissive to a fault. And yet, she's given to "exploring" the inhospitable inner reaches of her island.
I could buy this if she were an exploring, rambunctious ten-year-old, but she's in her twenties, so her exploring without motivation sets me head-scratching. Myrna's life changes when an African-American tourist brings the journal of the island's main land- and slave -owner's journal she'd stumbled upon to the resort where Myrna works as a maid.
Unable to speak with the woman due to the company's draconian guest-staff relations policies, she becomes obsessed with the content of the journal.
And much like her un-explained need to explore, she becomes oddly fixated on the journal. And makes some strange behavioral choices which seem odd. For instance, why not ask the guest's nanny, a person of about her station, to photocopy the important pages? Or just read it in the guest's room with notepad in hand when the guests were out?
Instead, Myrna obsesses, steals the book which threatens her family's economic survival. Her motivation seems thin. Though the book's idea intrigued me when I read it in the Chicago Review of Books, Entel's storytelling fell short for me.
A fan of Toni Morrison, who's the master of tracing slavery's impact on African-American psyches, I was expecting a lot out of the book. Perhaps it's an unfair comparison, but I found the character motivations and the almost surreal, inhuman rules the domestic help needed to heed in the resort weak. It wasn't bad, and it addresses some interesting issues, but there were too many plot, character and motivation 'holes' for me to bump it to 4.
Myrna works as a maid for a resort that was built on the grounds of a former slave plantation and unlocks the island's past. It's a quiet novel, but quite beautiful, too. Carmilla Voiez. Author 32 books followers. Fingerprints of Previous Owners, the debut novel by Rebecca Entel, is a beautiful and heartbreaking read about generational trauma, colonialism and racism, set on a tiny fictional Caribbean island.
The island doesn't belong to Myrna's people and it doesn't belong to the corporation who have purchased land with broken promises and erected fences to keep out the local population. The indigenous population died out so long ago that no memories of them remain. Myrna's enslaved ancestors built and worked the plantation that everyone wants to forget - "Anything and everything gets lost eventually. Disintegrated into sand we walked on. Unremembered but carried in the soles of our shoes.
There is hope at the end, not that everything will be mended, but that in naming their pain they can begin the long journey towards healing - "find out where the pain is coming from, Dad told me about his dentistry work.
To know exactly how to dig out the source of the pain. This was an intriguing story of the effect of not speaking about the past of the island at the center of the book, where a slaveholding plantation once existed.
Most of the island inhabitants are descendants of the slaves, and their history is so brutal that they prefer not to revisit it. In the meantime, the island is being taken over by a resort that employs the "natives" in menial jobs and obscures the island's history for tourist's sake. When an African American from the US arrives as a guest, the tears that were beginning to show become fissures. Although the story is told mainly from the perspective of one, compelling character, the narrative is interrupted by Beach Stories of other inhabitants, each with their own voice, shedding light on the past and the present.
I learned an inside perspective on US colonialism and militarism in the Caribbean, as well as insights into the unique perspective of the heirs of a legacy of this kind, unexamined. Gail Bauser. Those reviewers who have said this book was a nice story about a Caribbean Island have missed the point of the book. In this book, Entel gently explores racial inequities in a way that is not militant or preachy. The reader easily understands the main character, Myrna's, desire to learn about the history of the island's plantation.
And Myrna takes us on a journey in which we explore the subtle, and not so subtle, habits in a racially divided resort. This thought provoking story is more than a simple book about a Caribbean Island and is well worth your time. Leah Cripps. It took far too long for the history and the true plot to be revealed. This would have been a better book written as a factual non-fiction book. I found the character motivations unconvincing and tedious.
Lisa girlsinbooks. With the arrival of Mrs. Enjoy a good ghost story. This story has a little bit of a mystery that will appeal to fans of detective stories. Experience the imagery. Readers will be immersed in the Caribbean lifestyle. Readers will feel the sun on their shoulders and sand between their toes, smell the sweet breeze, and enjoy the view of endless waves and palm trees.
Reflect on history This story reminds readers of the importance of talking about the past. Suffused with the sun-drenched beauty of the Caribbean, Fingerprints of Previous Owners is a powerful novel of hope and recovery in the wake of devastating trauma.
In her soulful and timely debut, Entel explores what it means to colonize and be colonized, to trespass and be trespassed upon, to be wounded and to heal. Audacious, heartfelt and realistic, I found myself immersed in the perverted paradise of this island world, rooting for the characters I came to care so much about.
Her prose is lyrical, luminous, and each detail has been planted as precisely as a foundation stone Here's hoping that Entel follows her first novel with many more. A reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and slavery and their reverberations in the present day. Entel gives Myrna a distinctive voice and creates a rich history for the island and its residents.
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