Collection weaves nuanced portraits rooted in community

Uncertain Kin Janice Lynn Mather Doubleday Canada

Home, family, and immediate community are foundational in the stories of Janice Lynn Mather's immersive and subtle debut collection. While titles like Floors, Bread, Laundry, Aunties and Fresh Milk hint at the centrality of the domestic world in Uncertain Kin, their brevity can't relay the nuances — or ambivalence — of Mather's outlook.

Often set in modest addresses and careworn apartments in unnamed Bahamian cities and towns, Mather's portraiture captivates with its careful attention to unresolved dualities. Home is comfort but not always freeing; romance (or marriage) rules girls' hearts, but withers or fails; men are magnetic albeit feckless, violent, or averse to being hemmed in; streets seem radiant with fruit and flowers and yet they're the very places where girls disappear; and though maternal figures may offer guidance and education, they as easily decree their stern wisdom in the form of unbending rules and towering expectations.

For Vancouver-based Mather, whose harrowing young adult novel Learning to Breathe was a Governor General's Literary Award finalist in 2018, these Bahamian locations are no mere settings. “Last,” she writes on the book's Acknowledgments page, “to my people, the people of The Bahamas, my lilt and lyric, my earth, my blood.”

For readers “knowing” this group of 700 islands as all-inclusive resorts, exotic fauna, fruity cocktails, and snorkelling expeditions, Uncertain Kin is truly instructive. The 18 stories present a society that's far from idyllic and showing few signs of amelioration. But as much as Mather's characters are beset by troubles — violent crime, poverty, storms, judgment, loss of status: these realities are as embedded in the stories as home, family, and neighbourhood — they're bound and buoyed by an abiding kinship, particularly among women. Those ties may not always be kind, gentle, or tolerant, but like the salt air or sugar-apples in late summer — “splattered buffets left for the rats,” Mather writes — they're integral to the place.