A very unusual trauma-ridden book. A very different kind of book that I am unsure if I completely liked or not.

My thoughts on The Cursed Village are very mixed.
It is an interesting, compelling, coming of age story of survival and determination. I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Trinidad and its culture and like that the book follows Utasi through the ages and love his determined belief in education.
However it is a very harrowing and uncomfortable read. Whilst I loved the detail and scene setting in some parts of the book, in others there is almost too much details. I also struggled to believe Utasi's character and dialogue as a very young boy.

There was much of this book that I enjoyed. The setting was Trinidad in the 1940's and 1950's and it was interesting to hear some of the traditions and practises of the time. The novel tells the story of a young boy Usati who recounts the story of growing up in a small village.
At times I wondered is this book autobiographical and how does this relate to real life? At times it was a difficult read, with violence against children and women. I did however have to read it to the end and see how things worked out. The book covers many different life events and raises a lot of points to discuss. I could imagine this would be a good book to share in a book group.

This book tells the story of Usati, a four year old boy growing up in a small village in mid twentieth century Trinidad.

Harripersad Samaroo sets out here to paint a detailed portrait of Trinidad in the 1940s and 50s and whilst this intention is laudable, the result (for me at least) is a confused and incomprehensible mess. The narrative contains paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of description, whether or not the detail is relevant to the plot. We get lengthy descriptions of traditional toothbrushes, the names and uses of various types of pot, water carrier and bowl, an explanation of the corn trade, etc., etc., ad infinitum. The plot and characterization are drowned by the detail. This is a book that doesn't know what it wants to be – novel, historical text book or (one suspects, in parts) autobiography.

The author mostly writes in present tense, which simply does not work when dealing with a four year old protagonist. Usati's voice, thoughts and comprehension are strictly those of an adult throughout – no young child would, for instance, be able to put the high prevalence of tuberculosis within Trinidadian society into a world context or would be able to casually reel off the scientific name of the condition! This is but one example of many.

I really wanted to like this book, coming as it does from a first time author, but it's really, really not one for me.
Thank you to NetGalley and Matador Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to review this book.

This is my first DNF in over a year. I really wanted to finish the book, but there were so many things wrong that I simply couldn't.

I think that the premise is interesting, but the narrator just doesn't work at all. He is inconsistent. When the book begins he is four but narrates as though he is 60. No 4 yr old has ever been so eloquent or collected. The tone never matches the age of the character. Added to that there would be long areas of description about something (grinding cocoa beans, diabetes, to name a couple) that were just worded oddly.

Two, the story jumped around a lot. It was hard to keep up with the narrative when it's jumping from the story to something inconsequential to ten years later, and then back.

Third, this book doesn't really know what it wants to be. Is it a biography? Is it a textbook? is it a novel? It tries to be all three, and by doing so, it comes out as a mess that is difficult to read, dry, and loses the reader.

I wanted so much to enjoy this book. However, I just couldn't stay in it to finish reading it and stopped.

Before reading The Cursed Village my only knowledge of Trinidad was where it was on the map, so what I enjoyed most about this book was the insight into the country's culture and folk beliefs. There were some large and dark themes in the story. However, I struggled to connect with it on any deep level, and I think the narrative voice had a lot to do with that. At times the prose/narration seemed to suit the age of the narrator, but at other times it didn't, which was jarring. I also found the manner of addressing foreign words and accents off-putting. The phonetics were a tad overdone in places. The accent could have been shown without going so full on that bracketed explanations after words became necessary. It might have helped to have the glossary at the start instead of the end, so readers could view that first. Then the extensive in-text explanations could have been omitted. But this is now me speaking with my translator and editor hats on, rather than as a simple reader. Overall I am glad I read The Cursed Village as it gave me new knowledge on a foreign culture, but as a story I felt it needed more editing to improve both voice and pacing. As such, I am giving it three stars.

A deeply flawed but nonetheless compelling coming-of-age tale set in Trinidad in the 1940s and 1950s. Usati is a child of 4 when we first meet him and his life living with his grandparents after his mother’s death is not just hard but brutal. Yet in spite of all the obstacles put in his way – and there are many of them – and in spite of all the deprivation and hardship, Usati somehow finds the inner strength to not only survive but to get an education and then strive to bring literacy and a more enlightened outlook to his whole community. What I found disconcerting was the voice – sometimes Usati speaks like a child or young boy, at others he speaks eloquently and knowledgeably about things he couldn’t possibly have known at the time. There’s a whole long passage about his grandmother's diabetes, for example, which reads like a textbook. He has a strange distanced relationship with a young woman, about whom he waxes lyrical without ever having spoken to her, and plans his life with her in a long eloquent letter, but at an age when this seems most unlikely. And then there’s the violence. The endless brutal violence, particularly against children. The beatings are astonishing. I’ve read other memoirs of life in Trinidad – V S Naipaul, for example – and yes, beating children is seen as acceptable, but here the beatings are beyond belief. It's not for me to question the credibility or authenticity of the story, I can’t possible know that, but it certainly demands a willing suspension of disbelief at times. It’s not clear to me how much this is a novel and how much memoir, nor can I find anything out about the author (Feb 2021). However, the more I continued to read the more intrigued I became, and overall I found the book compelling and memorable. But it did leave me with a number of unanswered – and for the moment at least – unanswerable questions.