Carlette Poussant: Island Girl

From the book cover:
Carlette Poussant is a sweeping story that spans the lifetime of a young girl from Jamaica.
Carlette learned early on that life is not always easy, and everything has a price, but she's taken these hard lessons and gained strength from them. Now, she's returned to Cora's home, a refuge for single pregnant women in New York, where she gave birth to her own son after a failed teenage marriage. She is determined to help the young women there who have fallen prey to the scams of David Portugal.
Carlette met David when she was a struggling single mother with dreams of a career on the stage. An unscrupulous con artist posing as a producer, David cast her in a play, only to trick her into his bed. It didn't take long for Carlette to discover David's dark side, but the damage had already been done. Now he's moved on in search of more naive victims in Cora's home.
Will Carlette's efforts put an end to his deceptions?

My Review
I came across this book at my local library. I decided to give it a try because it's labeled as a romance and the heroine is a Jamaican girl - you don't see that often. This book was one of the worse books I've read since I started this blog.

So many discrepancies between the actual story and the synopsis on the book cover...

• Carlette Poussant is by no means a 'sweeping story'. So many details are brushed over and painted with such little detail, it felt more like someone was telling me a story that they heard from someone else, who heard it from someone else, and so a lot of important details got left out.
• Carlette doesn't learn any lessons early or later on in life. She ends the story the same naive girl she was when the story began, despite being almost 30 years older. When she returns to Cora's home she is seeking refuge herself, she doesn't save anyone from David Portugal and is not in the least bit worried about saving anyone from him. She's simply trying to escape the memories of the abuse she suffered at his hand.
• When Carlette met David she was a single mother but she wasn't struggling. She had pawned Ricky Jr. off on Cora in order to try and achieve her life goal of becoming an actress (in the hundred so pages leading up her decision to leave Ricky Jr. with Cora to pursue acting it was never mentioned that she had such a dream). David doesn't go to Cora's home seeking his victims. Through some weird and very unrealistic coincident all of his victims end up at Cora's home after being abused by him.
• Carlette doesn't put any effort into stopping David's deceptions. It's all Cora and Ginger. Once they get the ball rolling then she hops on board to testify at David's court case - just like all of David's other victims.

Leola Charles should have just called this novel Carlette Poussant (stop, period - that's it) because there is very little island flavour in this novel. The time spent in Jamaica is so beige the reader really doesn't get a feel for island living. This novel could have been set just about anywhere. And when Ms. Charles does try to inflect some island dialect into the speech she fails miserably. It was so appalling I did a Google search on Ms. Charles to find out her background. From what I could tell she's from Rochester, New York and most likely has not spent any significant amount of time in Jamaica or around Jamaicans. Whatever happened to writing about what you know or at the very least doing research?

The plot is all over the place. It's suppose to be Carlette's story but then at times it gets taken over by minor characters. There's zero romance in this novel. The relationships between Carlette and Ricky Sr. and Ricky Jr. and Theresa are far from what I would consider romance. The characters aren't developed in enough detail for the reader to really understand them and identify their actions as romantic. In developing her plot, Ms. Charles did a lot of telling and not enough showing.


1/5