A Novel That Weighs the Costs of Love and Motherhood

Women—especially mothers—make cruel choices in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novels. Take Margot, the protagonist in the Jamaican-born writer’s much-praised 2016 debut, Margot has sex with the customers at the hotel where she works, earning extra money to put her 15-year-old sister, Thandi, through school. She’s a second mother to Thandi, and she’s trying to save the girl from the sexual depredations that Margot herself experienced while growing up in Jamaica. Day-to-day, Margot doesn’t think the sex work is demeaning. “She sees it as merely satisfying the curiosity of foreigners,” Dennis-Benn writes, “foreigners who pay her good money to be their personal tour guide on the island of her body.” That doesn’t mean she forgives their mother, who sold Margot’s virginity to a stranger at the market years ago. Yet she also goes on to repeat the pattern: In pursuit of her own ambition—to become the