Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta was long-listed for the 2019 Giller Award, though it didn't make the short list. Nonetheless, this is a fairly remarkable achievement because #1) this is actually a collection of short stories (which often get short shrift) and #2) this is the author's first published book. However, it is true that this should rightly be considered a novel-in-stories. One reviewer quipped that this really should be titled Lives of Black Girls and Women, and there are strong ties to Munro's classic novel-in-stories.
The stories focus on Kara, a young girl of Jamaican heritage as she grows up in Toronto. The very first story "Pig Head" introduces her while she and her mother are staying with relatives in Jamaica. She is viewed by her cousins as "soft," and her mother generally agrees with this assessment. Viewing a severed pig head in the icebox is fairly traumatizing (though not as bad as watching her relatives kill chickens for soup), but she then uses the story to build up street cred at her school, back in Toronto.
Her mother, Eloise, had Kara when she was around 17, i.e. just a girl herself. Kara's father is not present in the household, and Kara has very limited interactions with him. Kara spends her time either with a group of school friends, mostly from the Caribbean, but also with her grandmother, Nana, and grandfather, George.
The relationship between Eloise and Kara's grandmother is incredibly tense. They have very different outlooks on life, starting from Nana's attachment to her church and her devotion to house keeping. Eloise and her mother get in a number of raging arguments during the various times that she and Kara have to move in with her mother. In one instance, Nana throws Eloise out, and only lets them back for one week (while Eloise finds a new apartment) when Kara is asked to be the go-between.
Eloise is largely driven by a desire to improve her own lot -- and to make sure that her daughter doesn't make the same mistakes she did. Incidentally, one of the reasons Eloise and Kara have to move back with Nana is that Eloise is a full-time grad student (in a PhD program* no less!). Eloise does push Kara in school, and in fact relocates a few times to enroll Kara in "better" schools, with the result that she is cut off from her main group of friends, who are mostly second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean.
Minor SPOILER alert:
One refreshing aspect of this book is that, while Kara certainly struggles with math, she never completely ditches school in favour of her friends (at most skipping school a couple of times), and she graduates from high school with several offers from good universities. Perhaps even more shocking (and in sharp contrast to Munro's Lives of Girls and Women), Kara does not throw her chance at university away, despite fooling around a bit with boys. She only "goes the distance" with boys who use protection, unlike her mother...
Where Frying Plantain does seem similar to other immigrant narratives is that Kara never quite knows where she fits into Canadian culture. Most of her friends, even after the move(s), are Caribbean. On the other hand, Kara decides she wants to go into the humanities (media studies) rather than a more "practical" profession. She does love her mother -- and her grandmother (in her own way) -- but she doesn't always see things the same way. She is particularly aggravated by the way her grandfather cheats on Nana, and yet always has a home to come back to. Kara doesn't want any part of these "country ways." It's harder to say what the bonds between Eloise and Nana are, but they certainly seem frayed most of the time. There doesn't seem to be any easy resolution to Kara's dilemmas (and the last stories are somewhat open-ended), but the reader generally supposes that she will go to university and probably ultimately see things more like her mother does.
* I would say that this feels like a slight mis-step in the plot in the sense that the vast majority of people in Eloise's position (and certainly most immigrants) would pursue a professional degree or stop at a Master's degree. PhDs actually have a negative earning potential for longer (than a Master's or most professional degrees), and in many cases individuals who stop at a Master's earn more than those with PhDs. This is not true for Associate or Full professors, but the number of these slots has shriveled up since the 1990s; generally under 25% of PhD holders will become tenure-track professors (and in some fields it is more like 5%). This article may actually be too rosy, and this piece from the Economist feels a bit more reflective of the reality. This is a long digression, but I found it a very odd artistic choice to have Eloise pursue a PhD.
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