He slipped his eight-year-old hand in mine, and took me back home: home to Antigua, to summers chasing butterflies in the hedges, and sugar cake hardening on the counter, and money stretched thin, and picking whatever fruit was in season, and scratching at opportunity, and tales of the soucouyant shedding her skin at night, and my first heartbreak – my Tanty’s death. That last is the only "fact" in this particular fiction.

In some ways, The Boy from Willow Bend is the easiest book I’ve written, because it took me to a place so familiar I was born knowing it. But it was also perhaps the hardest, as I was challenged to develop a rapport with this little boy, well schooled in burying the pain that came with his increasing isolation from all that was familiar to him. Mapping those changes while maintaining his buoyancy of spirit was the challenge; and when a woman stopped me in a supermarket car park to share her husband’s laughter, or my less-than-effusive sister told of the hurt it stirred in her, or a MySpace reader described it as "poignant and insightful", I felt I had, to some degree, succeeded.

Of course, being so rooted in its sense of place, in its Antiguanness, another challenge was, how would it translate to the wider world. And, while sales were underwhelming enough that it went out of print once...that one Amazon reader described it as "universal" and that another Caribbean reviewer wrote that while my characters feel real and Caribbean, "the story could have held up in any culture", hinted at its crossover appeal; as did the unexpected receipt of an email from a university student in Italy who said he’d selected it from many his teacher’d proposed to him.

That’s music to this author’s ears for reasons beyond sales. See, I grew up reading Jane Eyre and Little Women, of faraway places and dank English boarding schools, while toasting in the Caribbean sun. The idea that stories cannot translate is foreign to me. I believe if the story is well told, the characters well drawn, it doesn’t matter where they’re situated relative to the reader; a good story is a good story. Willow Bend’s reviews - "engaging…with a fleshy,well rounded character", "lively and absolutely believable", "thought-provoking", "charming" – suggest that it is that, to some who’ve read it.

I’d always guarded the dream in my heart, sunset gazing and wishing upon stars, but it took a long time for me to be able to say to myself, much less out loud, I’m a writer. Vere’s coming of age was a big part of my own coming to be. I believe in this book and I love this character. So, the fact that it’s now back in print and being read by school children across Antigua, with, fingers crossed for a wider audience, well, that’s just brawta – translation: icing on the cake.

By Joanne C. Hillhouse, author of The Boy from Willow Bend (ISBN-10: 1906190291/ISBN-13: 978-1906190293). Visit the author at jhohadli.com
© Joanne C. Hillhouse, 2010 (all rights reserved)

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