214 p., "Collins's novel is a tribute to the Afro-Caribbean oral tradition, a vanishing landscape as well as an exploration in "life sense." Characters such as Carib, Mamag, and Willive struggle against forgetting the historical ties that have implications for the present. In the end Collins would have us understand that the humanity of a people, the survival of a people, rests with its young, the young's willful desire to present to its community what the textbooks do not: the history of ordinary people." --Adele S. Newson, Florida International University.