Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go: Stories

by Sharon Leach

Sharon Leach’s Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go occupies new territory in Caribbean the characters of her stories are neither the folk of the old rural world, the sufferers of the urban ghetto familiar from reggae, nor the old prosperous brown and white middle class of the hills rising above the city, but the black urban salariat of the unstable lands in between, of the new housing developments. These are people struggling for their place in the world, eager for entry into the middle class but always anxious that their hold on security is precarious. These are people wondering who they are—Jamaicans, of course, but part of a global cultural world dominated by American material and celebrity culture. Her characters want love, self-respect, and sometimes excitement, but the choices they make quite often offer them the opposite. They pay lip service to the pieties of family life, but the families in these stories are no less spaces of risk, vulnerability, abuse, and self-serving interests. Bringing a cool, unsentimental eye to the follies, misjudgments, and self-deceptions of her characters, Leach never loses sight of their humanity or their individual natures.

200 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2014

Reviews

[Rosamond Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Sharon Leach's contemporary voice - it's a welcome perspective in Jamaican writing. Most of the stories were shocking, even for a non-prude like me. These short stories are deeply personal dark secrets that girls dare not speak of. So happy that Sharon Leach said them out loud. All of them. Couldn't help wishing there was a collection like this when I was in my late 20s

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is good. Sometimes, the language and events are repulsive. The succession of stories snakes through the societal stratum of present-day Jamaica (from low-class sleaziness to postgraduate professionals with manicured, gated property). The characters are in-and-out of marriages, holding onto secrets, scouting out exciting attachments, and inevitably altering expectations about their associations with others. What distressingly happens to the characters reveals Jamaica's vulnerability and if that can be allayed at all.

[Sue Corbett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories most quite good. Not my genres really - romance, sex, swearing all too much for me. Plots good though.