When Life Gives You Mangoes

Kereen Getten's When Life Gives You Mangoes is a Caribbean summer story for 9 year olds, narrated by a girl who cannot remember last summer.

What happens

Clara is twelve and lives on Sycamore Hill, where everybody's parents grew up together and nothing ever happens. She knows her name. She knows she used to surf every morning while her father went out fishing. She knows she does not do that any more.

What happened last summer is simply gone. Her mother fills in the blanks for her, and sometimes those borrowed memories stick so fast that Clara thinks they are hers.

And Gaynah, who is supposed to be her best friend, has started using it against her.

That is the real story here, and it is horribly well done. Gaynah is her cousin, lives just down the hill and has known her forever. She is also the one who announces in front of everybody that Clara does not remember anything, and then asks whether she is only pretending for attention. Clara counts to five, the way her mother taught her. It does not work.

Then a new girl arrives from England in cat's-eye sunglasses with two enormous white bows in her hair, and the whole hill comes out to look at her.

The writing is lovely and very close. You are inside Clara's head when she gets down to the beach with her board and cannot make her feet go any further. You get the heat that has no pity on you, the mangoes stolen off the ground and eaten in a hole dug behind the house, the game of pick leaf where the brave move is creeping into Ms Gee's yard for a guava leaf because she is nearly blind and might not hear you.

You also get Clara being genuinely awful back, which is one of the best things about her. She tips the box of everything she and Gaynah ever kept into the river, in front of the whole group, and then has to stand in the doorway while her mother holds up the dripping blue top and asks her why.

This one is heading somewhere sad, and it is fairly open about that. There is a memory Clara cannot reach. Her parents talk about her through the wall in voices that frighten her, and she hears her mother ask how much longer. She is terrified of water she used to love. Nothing in it is graphic and nothing is spelled out early, but it is a book about a child carrying something heavy, so a reader after a light holiday story should know that going in.

What to read next

When they are ready for another island and another girl with a head full of stories, The Case of the Lighthouse Intruder is by the same writer. Its Fayson has read so many detective novels that she narrates her own life as a twelve year old FBI agent, right up until the phone actually rings.