This novel did with words what Thandi's sketches did visually for her mother and sister. Such a precise, piercing snapshot of local lives in Jamaica - a view of day to day in a place that visitors see only as a paradise. So many difficult topics were touched on here, with the decision by decision struggle that each primary female character faced daily: doing whatever seemed best for those they cared about. But for each of them, the pressures they face from themselves and each other created a paradigm in which every sacrifice they made for the sake of the others, every difficult decision that was made with long term "betterment" in mind, began to cause harm in the short term. So much harm, in fact, that by the end each of these four women had pushed the others so far away that their lives no longer overlapped at all. Dolores, a mother who sold her older daughter's innocence over and over to help put food on the table and "fix" her devilish attraction to women and pressured her younger daughter to go to school and become a doctor to "save the family". Margot, that older daughter who in turn sold herself and other young girls in order to make money, to get ahead in a man's world, to send her younger sister to school and to get out of the poor/run-down area they called home (and to have a chance at a real life with a woman she loved). Thandi, the younger daughter/sister who never know who she was because she spent so much time conforming to other's expectations, who tried to hide the scars of her past and ignore her heart to be that perfect person who would "pay them back tenfold once she gets out and becomes a doctor," who gets caught between two worlds - talking too smart and being too sheltered to fit in with her own family and childhood friends while also being too poor and black to fit in at school. And Verdene, Margot's somtimes lover who is just looking for someone to love and to love her back, to come to terms with her past, her guilt, to attempt to re-become part of a community that shuns her because she has nowhere else to go. And the side characters who all had their own hard-hitting stories in turn, Charles, Miss Violet, Jullette, Nova Scott-Henry, and whose interactions together weave a full tapestry of a neighborhood under a burning sun in a part of the country that everyone finds it easier to pretend doesn't exist. Each of these characters do what they think they need to for survival, to get ahead, and learn (in their different ways) that perhaps some things aren't worth it, that maybe money can't buy happiness when love and innocence are what you sacrifice to get it, but by the time you learn that it's too late. And how would you ever know that if you've never had access to the money you need to survive? This is a harsh, compelling depiction of the hard sides and sharp edges of life, but a gorgeous representation and ode to the lives of those that live it, written with a perfect cadence to pay homage to this island.