Mike Finn’s Reviews > Fingerprints of Previous Owners > Status Update

This is beautifully written but very hard to take. I've just been through a chapter that finally gives a view (albeit an owners view) of plantation life. The details of the way in which the slaves were treated, punished, used, sold are not new to me but this book makes them real. It's the difference between reading a map and walking the land.

Taking this in, this English heritage of wealth from pain, is shameful.

This is astonishingly powerful.

There are things called 'Bench Interviews' between the chapters of the main narrative. Each has an islander talking about his or her life. They're basically short stories with a common context and they are SO intense. I'd buy the book for them alone.

There's one where a man explains why he walks the island with a violin bow in a sock hanging on his back that is so human it hurts.

Tourists are welcomed to the island by maids, dressed in white sheets as 'natives':

'Christine and I ducked our heads to remove strands of plastic beads and handed them to the tourists in exchange for pennies. I could see in their eyes the expectation of gratitude. Pennies, not worth stooping to the ground for back at their homes, were transformed through some sort of island alchemy. The alchemy of poverty.'

Here's how our main character, who works at the resort, describes her work:

'My ID tag said nothing but "Maid" but it was also my job to be silent and visible only when the tourists wanted to see me. "At work2 meant not just a place or a time. A being. A not being.'