Pamela Mordecai’s Red Jacket is a richly rewarding reading experience, a lyrical nod to the impossibility, and even wrongness, of reducing lives to chronology or to one or two crystalizing moments. Myriad points of view, a variety of englishes, and a wise and smartly handled fractured timeline are mined to unearth the powerful story of Grace Carpenter and to gather up and pay homage to the village that constitutes her community, at home and abroad. This book is more than a heartbreaking, beautiful story; it is also a bawdy meditation on storytelling and the art of writing. 

One of Mordecai’s strengths is the specific, detailed recreation of a tangible space. Naming—of places, people, streets, plants—and an artist’s eye for shape, light, texture and density flesh out the landscapes of her stories… An online description of Mordecai’s co-edited volume Culture and Customs of Jamaica reassures us that there is in fact much more to Jamaica than beautiful beaches and reggae music, and that the text “richly surveys the fuller wealth of the Caribbean nation, focusing on its people, history, religion, education, language, social customs,” and so on. In twelve short stories, Pink Icing does all this and more, with the added bonus of being a totally pleasurable read.