This novel, by a Canadian writer born in Barbados, explores the brutality of plantation life, not as it was experienced in the fields but in the subtler cruelties inflicted on a worker named Mary, who, as a girl, catches the manager's eye and then becomes his favored mistress and the mother of his only son. Forced into a life of loveless "fooping" but also one of material comfort and privilege, Mary is separated both from her own people and from the white establishment, and spends decades in her "home-prison" contemplating the "ritual and arrangement of life on the Plantation." With an obvious affection for Caribbean cadence and its rum-soaked asides, Clarke unfolds Mary's story through the meandering statement she gives to the police after she has taken gruesome revenge on her "master" using the hoe of the title, the very tool that his attentions enabled her to drop.

Sending to hyphen8 -- a wishlist tag. I tried reading the first 50 or so pages of this and couldn't get into it. Hope you have better luck with it!

Arrived today as a - thank you!

Friday, June 29, 2018: left with the hoes (and other garden tools). (Larger photo here.)

Released for gypsysmom's Canada Days challenge and babypooh's Allergic to A challenge.

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