Two Starred Reviews for Ever Since We Small

Celeste Mohammed’s upcoming, Ever Since We Small, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly:

Mohammed (Pleasantview) offers a wrenching novel-in-stories of a Trinidadian family spanning from the matriarch’s passage to the West Indies at the end of the 19th century to her present-day descendants’ efforts to cope with inherited trauma. It opens with “The Legend of Jayanti,” whose title character, a young Hindu woman in 1899 India, rejects the ritual practice of sati and refuses to be burned alive alongside the corpse of her recently deceased husband. Shunned by her community, she’s signed into indentured servitude in the West Indies and travels there with a fellow indentured servant named Gopal, whom she marries on the ship to Trinidad. “Outsiders” follows Jayanti and Gopal’s great-grandson, Shiva, who’s cursed when he accidentally drowns an imp-like creature called a buck. The curse manifests in “Godfrey’s Revenge,” which finds Shiva destitute in 1989 after he takes 13-year-old Salma Mohammed for his bride and loses an eye in a construction accident. In “Sundar Larki,” Shiva, unemployed and drunk, slashes Salma to death with a machete before taking his own life. “The Visitation” follows one of the couple’s three children, 20-something Abby, who tries to lighten her dark skin in anticipation of meeting her online boyfriend, a white American. Throughout, Mohammed beautifully captures the rhythm and music of Trinidadian patois (“If yuh not white, yuh black,” says Shiva’s father). Readers will be deeply affected. (Jan.)

And a starred review in the Jan/Feb issue of Foreword Reviews: