Four generations of a family in Barbados, and its many many family secrets. Each section is a generation apart, set just as the protagonist comes of age and makes the choices that will influence the course of the rest of their life, and the birth of the next generation. The first sections were pretty bleak, with the characters constantly compromising for the "greater good" only to have their good deeds tossed back in their face. I also don't really get all consuming obsessive loves for disaster humans (like I know it's a thing that people do, it just rarely works for me in fiction), and there was a lot of het sex. The gay kid in the 2018-2019 towards the end was the only section I really liked in and of itself.

So it feels like the book shouldn't have worked for me, but it ended up coming together as a whole a lot better than the parts. I especially liked how often it turned out that a tonne of people knew the family secrets, and that trying to keep them was generally pointless. I also liked how the stories layered together, and how we got outside (and equally biased) looks at all of the past generations every time we met a new character. Each character has a different view of the Island, and the choices available thereon. (And I learned a lot about Barbados.) The book is very smartly put together in a way that I've been thinking about a lot since I read it.

(Randomly, this is the second book I've read this month that's had a young mixed-race man from the Caribbean moving to Toronto, living with an uncle named "Junior," and not finding a warm welcome. They also both came out in 2022. I hope Sealy and Murray read each other's books and got a chuckle out of that.)