Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors shed light on their recently released books by comparing them to weird things. This week Naomi Jackson writes about The Star Side of Bird Hill, her debut novel published this summer by Penguin Press.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were a sanitarium, it would be called Star Side: A Home for Wayward Women and Girls.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were ice cream, it’d be a double cone of Chefette cherry vanilla, made in Barbados. I’ve heard reports from readers that these characters keep them up well past their bedtime, that it’s the kind of book, like ice cream, where you can’t have just a taste, but you know that eating too much at once might ruin your appetite. If The Star Side of Bird Hill were an ice cream, it might be the kind of delicacy that pleasurably rots your teeth.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were a Flatbush girl, she’d be rocking an outfit where her t-shirt, jeans, bra, panties, and fifty-four elevens (Reeboks for the uninitiated) all matched.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were a nerdy girl, she’d have a crush on Caribbean literary fiction.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were a lecherous pastor, he’d have outside children with the prettiest women in the district.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were your Bajan granny, she’d tell you inscrutable things like “don’t take a six for a nine” and “hard ears can’t hear,” make you feel bad about yourself with just one killer look, and then make it up to you with a plate of fishcakes fresh from the frying pan so perfect they’d follow you into your dreams.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were a person, she would aspire to have the swagger of her most braggadocious Jamaican uncle.
If The Star Side of Bird Hill were a cocktail, it would be a rum punch so strong you’d finish reading it and wonder how long you’d been out cold.
Naomi Jackson graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Brooklyn. The Star Side of Bird Hill is her first novel. Find her on Twitter at @thenaomijackson or at www.naomi-jackson.com.
