Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard

Readers desiring to learn more about the fiction and poetry of the talented Jamaican sisters Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard will welcome this comprehensive study.The premise for Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard is that it is the first book-length study of Pollard's writing "on a par with that of her sister" (p.118).Violet Harrington Bryan's slim volume packs a wealth of information about the familial, historical, diasporic, religious, and folkloric contexts to literary works steeped in the language and culture of Woodside, St. Mary, the rural village Brodber still calls home.It adopts a comparative approach, which allows Bryan to make larger historical and socioeconomic connections across each sister's body of works.After an introductory chapter that offers an overview of the book's topics, the second chapter focuses on Pollard's first novella, Karl (1992), and Brodber's first novel, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), presenting them as allegories for the Jamaican nation's struggle to find its cultural identity.Both stories are staged on the cusp of independence for showing the persistence of colonialism and the necessity to reject an identity of upward mobility toward Whiteness.Since Brodber's Jane and Louisa is more familiar to readers, I appreciated Bryan's discussion of it alongside Pollard's Karl, which was awarded a 1992 Casa de las Amricas literary prize.Brodber is herself the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jamaican Musgrave Gold Medal (1999) and Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize (2017).The ensuing chapters alternate between literary works by Brodber and those by Pollard, maintaining a comparative approach.Chapter 3 discusses the African cosmologies of spirit theft and spirit possession in Brodber 's Myal (1988) and Louisiana (1993), while Chapter 5 explains the genres of Afrofuturism and speculative fiction in her subsequent novels, The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007) and Nothing 's Mat (2014).Since Brodber's novels have received considerable critical attention, the value of Bryan's discussion lies less in providing new interpretations than in explaining their complex plotlines in which myths and fables intersect with history.Her lucid summaries are helpful for readers who might have difficulty unraveling Brodber's multiple intersecting plots, shifting narrative voices, and nonlinear time sequences.However, a disadvantage of her comparative approach is that Pollard's realist style, rather than being taken on its own terms, is measured against Brodber's experimental narratives.Bryan does credit Pollard for her attentiveness to the multifaceted qualities of the Jamaican language, particularly Rastafarian, which is also the subject of her

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