The author, raised in Kingston, Jamaica, sets her story in 1994, in (fictional) River Bank, a former fishing village just outside Montego Bay where wealthy European tourists see one side of local life: luxurious, extravagant, catering to their every whim.
Real estate developers view the land as the future sites of grand resorts.
The workers return home each night “to their shabby neighborhoods, away from the fantasy they help create about a country where they are as important as washed-up seaweed.”
The moneyed Jamaicans who deal with them speak with “the right edge of patois to sharpen their innuendos and help them appeal to the common men they exploit.”
In one brutal scene, Delores calls Margot a “dirty whore” and practically taunts Margot to kill her.
Delores spends her days selling trinkets at a tourist market, while Margot toils away at the resort.
Everything she does, she tells herself, is to pay for Thandi’s tuition at a Catholic high school, and to invest in her sister’s future in medical school.
Margot dreams of living in a beachfront villa in a “quiet, gated community.”
Thandi lives to gain the approval of others — even buying a hydrogen peroxide cream to lighten her dark skin, to feel “less invisible and more beautiful,” as she “imagines her blackness peeling off” so she can get a good job someday and support her family.
Margot already has one secret life — sleeping with men for money (and eventually managing a prostitution ring of mostly underage girls).
[...] Margot’s ruthlessness, acts of manipulation and even blackmail, and her discomfort with her sexuality, may ruin the relationship that sustains her most.
