How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In 'Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,' an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race.

In 'Mash Up Love,' a twin's chance sighting of his estranged brother--the prodigal son of the family--stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In 'Bad Behavior,' a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In 'Mermaid River,' a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart.

In 'The Ghost of Jia Yi,' a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in 'Shirley from a Small Place,' a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother's big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital.

In “Island” a woman contemplates the easy rightness of her first lesbian kiss. This is the lone lesbian content.