When a book has glowing reviews from @reads.and.reveries, @bookofcinz, @end.notes and @ns510reads, I KNOW I'm in for an excellent read. Frying Plantain just proved that! This was my second interwoven short story collection of August, although this one is a lot more direct. All of the stories follow Kara Davis as she grows up in 'Little Jamaica' in Toronto. It's like the bookish equivalent of a film highlights reel, as we get to see some of the defining episodes of Kara's upbringing.

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So we start from a story set in Jamaica where Kara is visiting family and she comes across a pig's head in the freezer. Although she's shaken by it, once back home she begins to reconstruct different narratives of the event with her friends at her mostly-white elementary school and her friends in her neighbourhood. This is the beginning of Kara trying to get to grips with her identity as a girl growing up in the Jamaican diaspora.

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As she moves up through the education system and to university, she grapples with her identity constantly. To her white friends she is decidedly not 'Canadian enough', but her Black friends don't see her as 'Jamaican enough'. Reid-Benta perfectly captures how casually cruel 14-year-old girls can be, and the complex dynamics of their friendships.

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Motherhood is the other key theme of this collection, as Kara is raised by her single mother and her grandmother. I love reading anything to do with familial relationships, especially mother/daughter ones and Frying Plantain more than delivers on that front. We're privy to tensions around first boyfriends, independence, and family ties, but also to the small acts of everyday love and kindness that make a family.

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I think this is a great choice for anyone who's not too sure about short stories because it doesn't have that fragmented feel of a random collection - it's all cohesive. We really get to know Kara through these stories, and I was sad to let her go by the end!