Patsy

A stunningly powerful inter-generational novel about the price--the ransom really-- women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity. Frank, funny, salty, heartbreaking, full of love, Dennis-Benn is a map-maker to those places in the heart held so closely, the holder may not know even they're there.--Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Beautiful, shattering, and deeply affecting. Patsy's story ultimately makes for a novel that is destined to endure.--Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen
A novel that splits at the seams with yearning, elegantly written and deeply felt. Dennis-Benn leads the reader through Patsy's life with empathy and grace.--Esme Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
An aching meditation on motherhood, sacrifice, and what it means to look truth in the face in order to fully become oneself. A beautiful book, as heartbreaking as it is restorative.--Cristina Henriquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans
Sumptuous... Dennis-Benn ingeniously humanizes and changes up the typical immigrant saga... The result is a knowing, at times painfully funny novel about the disorienting relationship between selfhood and sacrifice.--O, The Oprah Magazine
Dennis-Benn writes about the immigrant experience with abiding, bone-deep empathy--swinging between standard English and patois the same way that Patsy and her daughter navigate their own need to code-switch as the years pass. Estranged from one another and bound to a world that tends to treat black womanhood and queer sexuality as invisible at best, their separate but intertwined stories wend through hurt and hope and inalienable dreams; not just for a better life, but a truly honest one.--Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
Brilliant... [Dennis-Benn] writes with keen awareness of what others experience living undocumented in America--and the compromises that women make in order to prioritize themselves.--Elle
Astonishing.... Dennis-Benn's writing is ravishing, full of the musical rhythm of Jamaican dialect, sprinkled like hot spices throughout a narrative that is colorful, heartbreakingly sad and bristling with life.--Caroline Leavitt - San Francisco Chronicle
[A] provocative, muscular book. Dennis-Benn takes care with characters, building intricate relationships, and writes in exquisite prose that brings to life Pennyfield, the Jamaican neighborhood Patsy is from, and the Caribbean diaspora in New York.... Draws the complexity of experiencing one's sexuality, and the varying ways sexuality is understood in the larger community.--Alexia Arthurs - Ms. Magazine
Patsy is a probing novel about freedom, examining one woman's shifting conception of it, and how people weigh what they are willing to trade for liberty.... The immigrant novel has a rich tradition in American literature.... Patsy adds to that lineage with its engrossing portrait of a complicated woman who struggles against crushing societal forces in her quest--not to sacrifice her life for future generations--but to finally unfurl her true self.--Jenny Shank - Minneapolis Star-Tribune