‘An outstanding debut’ CHERIE JONES, author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House
‘Vivid and authentic’ LEONE ROSS, author of This One Sky Day
‘Cacophonic, alive and heartbreaking’ KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE, author of The Mercies
‘A gripping page-turner’ CAMILLE HERNÁNDEZ-RAMDWAR, author of Suite as Sugar and Other Stories
As featured on BBC’s Cultural Frontline podcast
At eighteen years old, Dinah gave away her baby son to the rich couple she worked for before they left Jamaica. They never returned. She never forgot him.
Eighteen years later, a young man comes from the US to Kingston. From the moment she sees him, Dinah never doubts – this is her son.
What happens next will make everyone question what they know and where they belong.
A powerful story of belonging, identity and inheritance, What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You brings together a blazing chorus of voices to evoke Jamaica’s ghetto, dance halls, criminal underworld and corrupt politics, at the beating heart of which is a mother’s unshakeable love for her son.
‘Delicate but gut-wrenching’ JOSIE D’ARBY, broadcaster
‘Irresistible’ CURDELLA FORBES, author of A Tall History of Sugar
‘Arresting’ LISA ALLEN-AGOSTINI, author of The Bread the Devil Knead
‘Wonderful’ JACOB ROSS, author of The Bone Readers
‘Exciting’ YEWANDE OMOTOSO, author of An Unusual Grief
‘Thrilling’ CELESTE MOHAMMED, author of Pleasantview
‘Vivid and authentic’ LEONE ROSS, author of This One Sky Day
‘Cacophonic, alive and heartbreaking’ KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE, author of The Mercies
‘A gripping page-turner’ CAMILLE HERNÁNDEZ-RAMDWAR, author of Suite as Sugar and Other Stories
As featured on BBC’s Cultural Frontline podcast
At eighteen years old, Dinah gave away her baby son to the rich couple she worked for before they left Jamaica. They never returned. She never forgot him.
Eighteen years later, a young man comes from the US to Kingston. From the moment she sees him, Dinah never doubts – this is her son.
What happens next will make everyone question what they know and where they belong.
A powerful story of belonging, identity and inheritance, What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You brings together a blazing chorus of voices to evoke Jamaica’s ghetto, dance halls, criminal underworld and corrupt politics, at the beating heart of which is a mother’s unshakeable love for her son.
‘Delicate but gut-wrenching’ JOSIE D’ARBY, broadcaster
‘Irresistible’ CURDELLA FORBES, author of A Tall History of Sugar
‘Arresting’ LISA ALLEN-AGOSTINI, author of The Bread the Devil Knead
‘Wonderful’ JACOB ROSS, author of The Bone Readers
‘Exciting’ YEWANDE OMOTOSO, author of An Unusual Grief
‘Thrilling’ CELESTE MOHAMMED, author of Pleasantview
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Reviews
Truth-telling! Taylor's debut is tender, violent and uncompromising in turns. A vivid and authentic Jamaica that tells a tale too often hidden, for fantasies of sun, sea and sand.
Sharma Taylor's debut novel What A Mother's Love Don't Teach You is a brilliant examination of lives in Jamaica. Taylor writes powerfully about those lives, trapped in often distressing social circumstances, with wit and a searingly analytical eye. Always, though, her empathy with the characters comes through, so the reader is ensnared by her artistry and is willing to seek to understand each character, no matter how superficially evil. The true power of the work comes from its thorough grounding in the Jamaican experience, the cascade of similes that enlighten and the descriptions of the physical landscapes. All of these combine to create an impression on the reader that is not only visual but profoundly emotional. An extraordinary first novel
Sharma Taylor writes in extra high definition: colour, language, landscape and atmosphere. But it is her laser-like, yet careful study of the inner thoughts and emotions of her characters that fascinates. An astonishing first novel.
A beautifully crafted debut, rich with rhythmic, lyrical patois and surprising revelations
A sharp polyphonous story in which Taylor skillfully moves the reader through a world pulsing with pain, love, power, violence and tenderness. We are reminded of that tension between where we come from and what we gravitate towards, what steers us and why. An exciting read.
Pulses with the colour and cadence of Jamaican culture in a multi-layered story told with empathy and intelligence. It is both an elegy of great elegance and a testament to the resilience and optimism of Jamaican people. Sharma's skilled storytelling drew me into the heads and hearts of the residents of Jacks Hill and Lazarus Gardens and did not let me go. I'll never forget this cast of characters or the voice of this accomplished writer - an outstanding debut.
Sharma Taylor's What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You explores essential aspects of Jamaica's Social Psychological Environment which Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings leaves unpainted. In short, these two works could usefully be read together. May Sharma's work meet the kind of success that Marlon's work has.
In the opening chapter of What A Mother's Love Don't Teach You, Dinah describes her home, the tenement yard at Lazarus Gardens, as a place where, "is like everyday, the water have to decide if to come inside." In essence, the novel is about just that: choices. Written in alternating voices - sometimes Jamaican patois, sometimes Standard English - Sharma Taylor reveals how and why the choices of the denizens of Lazarus Gardens necessarily differ from the choices of Jamaica's uptown folk. Taylor's great accomplishment is how she captures the darkness of the ghetto while never dimming the vivacity, determination and exuberance displayed by its people. This is a thrilling read.
Sharma Taylor's accomplished debut novel transports the reader from the rarefied air of Kingston's Jacks Hill to the gritty reality of inner city Lazarus Gardens. Told by an unforgettable cast of characters, each speaking searing truths of their own Jamaica, these compelling voices will linger long after the last page. What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You is a fine achievement.
Sharma Taylor's live-wire debut is a crackling, earthy and colourful social realist polyphony that brings to life the bullet-strewn Jamaica of the 1980s.
I was knocked out by this novel. It's a fantastic, enthralling story of clashing cultures: very funny and then utterly heartbreaking. The vibrant and terrifying world of Kingston in the eighties is totally gripping and the dialogue is so alive that I find it hard to believe it's a first novel
A cacophonic, alive, heart-breaking story of a particular place and time, made universal by its truths and wisdom about love.
Jamaican literature has a future. Her name is Sharma Taylor.
Taylor portrays a complex web of Jamaican characters in settings ranging from tenement yards to mansions with an authenticity that radiates throughout the novel. Set in an important time in the island's history, it's a colourful portrayal of a young man searching for his soul, the two mothers desperate to claim him, and the ultimate sacrifice one has to make. A wonderful debut novel.
Echoes the dilemma of having to give up home and family to find hope elsewhere. Precious things wagered in pursuit of better might never be regained. Taylor's intimate portrayals of this dissonance is communicated through authentic voices full of universal truth, love and forgiveness.
An astonishing book. In riveting, irresistible prose, Sharma Taylor's genre-crossing novel (a love story, a crime story, a yard fiction) tells a tale of Jamaica and America, of class, colour, race, history and the dignity of the dispossessed. The authenticity of its detail produces a searing truth that convicts us. The largeness of its vision challenges our ideas of what it means to be human.
Takes us on a wonderful multifaceted journey through the lives, loves, pleasures and atrocities of the folks of Lazarus Gardens and Jacks Hill. There is an impressive choral quality to What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You, with voices that shift with remarkable ease and seamlessness, between lyricism, humour and rawness. A very impressive achievement.
An arresting first novel. As if to nod to the Jamaican national motto "Out of Many One People," Taylor's novel gives voice to multiple perspectives on how class, race and gender are lived in this "exotic" Caribbean island and at what cost to human relationships.
What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You is both heartbreaking and illuminating . . . Sharma's voice is vital and necessary
Warm, wise, unflinching. Taylor's skill with character and voice shines in this immersive story of living and loving under the shadow of betrayal.
This novel, a page-turner in every way, is skilfully plotted and brilliantly written. Taylor's unforgettable characters, vivid portrayal of human ruthlessness counterpoised with communal solidarity and generosity, and deft use of the Jamaican vernacular are some of the many striking features of this superb novel.
This forceful novel offers a collision of pasts and present, mothers and sons and lovers, offered up in language that eloquently highlights our divisions and the (rare) possibilities of true connection. This is a character-led novel where pace is as important as tone and place comes singing off the page. Somehow Taylor has managed to create a work that is polyphony and cacophony and gloriously, simultaneously, symphony.
Imagine yourself on your front porch with your neighbour, in the cool of the afternoon when all your housework is done; get yourself a little coconut water and allow Sharma Taylor to tell you about all the goings-on of this neighbourhood of Kingston. Girl, if you see drama! Drama, girl! ! And this being the Caribbean, nobody's going to walk on by when they hear a good story being told, and before you know it, you have the whole cast of characters on the porch with you, everyone clamouring to tell their side of the story - the Jamaican dialogue in this novel is a particular strength. As one of the characters proclaims, about a particularly good spliff: "Is de real stuff, dis, my yute!" Rich and exuberant.
As Sharma Taylor's debut proves with fevered intensity, some threads remain unbreakable despite the cruel vicissitudes of fate. Guiding her novel with a tension-laced economy, Taylor offers a prismatic cast of figures swirling around Dinah and her estranged son. In the voices of gang leaders and snake-tongued statesmen, redoubtable matriarchs and kiss-teeth gossips, the multiple worlds of 1980s Jamaica soar to life, vividly and dramatically realised. What a Mother's Love Don't Teach You joins a formidable contemporary canon that refuses to portray the Caribbean as idyllic pastiche. It's a tender triumph
Voices are strong, resilient and compelling, right from the start, with sharp, vivid imagery. An ambitious novel about the Caribbean in the eighties, but also well before then and even now. What kind of Jamaica have we made, what may we yet inherit?