Land of Love and Drowning (Yanique)

Land of Love and Drowning 
Tiphanie Yanique, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594488337


Summary
A major debut from an award-winning writer—an epic family saga set against the magic and the rhythms of the Virgin Islands.

In the early 1900s, the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule, and an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea. Orphaned by the shipwreck are two sisters and their half brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them.

Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic, set against the emergence of Saint Thomas into the modern world. Uniquely imagined, with echoes of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, and the author’s own Caribbean family history, the story is told in a language and rhythm that evoke an entire world and way of life and love.

Following the Bradshaw family through sixty years of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, love affairs, curses, magical gifts, loyalties, births, deaths, and triumphs, Land of Love and Drowning is a gorgeous, vibrant debut by an exciting, prizewinning young writer. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 20, 1978
• Where—St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
• Education—B.A., Tufts University; M.F.A. University of Houston
• Awards—Rona Jaffe Writers' Award; Pushcart Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, and St. Thomas, Virgin Islands


Tiphanie Yanique is a Caribbean fiction writer, poet and essayist, whose debut novel Land of Love and Drowning was published in 2014.

Yanique's maternal roots are in the Virgin Islands and her paternal roots in Dominica. She was raised in the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas by her grandmother, Beulah Smith Harrigan, a former children’s librarian. Her biological grandfather was Dr. Andre Galiber of St. Croix. All her grandparents are now deceased.

Education and teaching
In 2000, Yanique earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University in Massachusetts. Shortly after graduating, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in Literature in English and Creative Writing at The University of the West Indies for which she conducted research on Caribbean women writers, such as Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber in Trinidad and Tobago.

She went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Houston in 2006, where she held a Cambor Fellowship. Later that year she served as the 2006-2007 Writer-in Residence/Parks Fellow at Rice University, teaching creative writing, fiction and nonfiction, and working as the faculty editor of The Rice Review literary magazine.

From 2007-2011, she taught undergraduate and graduate writing and teaching courses as an assistant professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at Drew University in New Jersey—during which time she also worked as an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine (2007–08) and an associate editor of Post No Ills Magazine (2008–11), as well as the director of writing and curriculum at the Virgin Islands Summer Writers Program (2008-2011).

She is currently an assistant professor of writing at The New School in New York City, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students.

Writing
Yanique’s debut collection How to Escape a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories (2010) received praise from the Caribbean Review of Books, Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other journals. Her children’s picture book I am the Virgin Islands (2012) was commissioned by the First Lady of the Virgin Islands as a gift to the children of the Virgin Islands. Yanique’s husband, photographer Moses Djeli, created the images for the book.

Her short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, Boston Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Accolades
In 2011, Yanique won the BOCAS Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the National Book Foundation recognized her as one of their 5 under 35 honorees, an award that celebrates five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists. She was one of the three writers awarded the 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for fiction, along with Helen Phillips and Lori Ostlund.

She is also the winner of a 2008 Pushcart Prize for her short story the “The Bridge Stories” and the Kore Press Short Fiction Award for her short story “The Saving Work. She has also been awarded the 2006 Boston Review Fiction Prize for her short story “How to Escape from a Leper Colony.” She received The Academy of American Poets Prize in 2000 and has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley, and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers.

Personal
Tiphanie currently lives between Brooklyn, NY, and St. Thomas, VI, with her husband, son and daughter. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
A debut novel about three generations of a Caribbean family. It reads lush and is graced with rotating narrators, each of whom has a distinct and powerful voice.
USA Today


The novel provides readers with beautiful, imaginative prose via a story set in the Virgin Islands.
Ebony


Spellbinding.
Elle


This hypnotic tale tracks a Virgin Islands family through three generations of blessings and curses. It starts in 1900, with a shipwreck that orphans two sisters and the half-brother they've just met, and then spinso out magic, mayhem, and passion.
Good Housekeeping


Sink or swim is the guiding theme in this fantastical, generational novel.
Marie Claire


A feat of tropical magical realism.
Vanity Fair


(Starred review.) [A]n epic multigenerational tale set in the U.S. Virgin Islands that traces the ambivalent history of its inhabitants during the course of the 20th century.... Through the voices and lives of its native people, Yanique offers an affecting narrative of the Virgin Islands that pulses with life, vitality, and a haunting evocation of place.
Publishers Weekly


In  the early 1900s, a ship sinks off the Virgin Islands just as they are being transferred from Danish to American rule, and two sisters and their half-brother are orphaned. Fortunately, each has a distinctive magical gift. A three-generation saga from an author born on St. Thomas, VI.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) A debut novel traces the history of the U.S. Virgin Islands through the fate of a family marked by lust, magic and social change.... Bubbling with talent and ambition, this novel is a head-spinning Caribbean cocktail.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Land of Love and Drowning opens in 1917 on the cusp of St. Thomas’s transfer from Danish rule to American.  Why do you think Tiphanie Yanique has chosen to open her novel with this event?  What is the significance of the transfer of power?  What does “Americanness” mean to the characters?  How does it change who they are?  Does it also change how they relate to one another or how they relate to the Virgin Islands in general?

2. Think about the meaning of land and property in Land of Love and Drowning.  Who owns land?  Who owns property?  What does ownership mean to the different characters?  Does the idea of ownership change over the course of the book?

3. Anette and Eeona Bradshaw present two different ways of being a woman.  Where Anette gives in to her desires, Eeona represses hers.  Is there a reason they are so different in this way? How do you see these differences affecting the course of their lives?

4. While in the Army, Jacob Esau McKenzie has a jarring encounter with institutionalized racism, something that is somewhat unfamiliar to him.  How is the awareness of race connected with the idea of becoming American? Are there other lines of demarcation on St. Thomas besides race? A form of prejudice that Jacob would have found more familiar? Which of these perceived divisions are imposed by outsiders and which come from the Virgin Islanders themselves?

5. Think of the other islands mentioned in Land of Love and Drowning.  How are they different places from St. Thomas?  What is the importance of St. John and Anegada in the novel?

6. Beaches and access to them figures prominently throughout Land of Love and Drowning.  Think of the scenes that are set on the beach.  What does the beach represent in these moments?  The action of the last third of the focuses on public access to beaches.  Why is the privatization of the beaches so important?  What is lost when beaches are no longer accessible to everyone?

7. Imagine you are going to visit the Virgin Islands as a tourist. Would reading Land of Love and Drowning influence your opinion of the resorts there?

8. How is magic employed throughout Land of Love and Drowning? Who has access to magic and who doesn’t?  How do the characters use it?  Is there a changing relationship with magic over time?  What does it mean to be a witch? Does the term mean something different in the culture of these islands than it does in the United States or Europe? Who is considered a witch in the book?

9. The Bradshaw family curse is passed down through the generations.  What do you think Tiphanie Yanique intends to suggest in Land of Love and Drowning with this curse? How does it relate to the secrets that these family members keep from one another? From the Virgin Islands as a whole?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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