When the army comes calling, looking for recruits for the Korean War, Audrey’s father sees an opening, believing that the G.I. Townshend paints it colorfully, as a place where “the wind blows down from the mountain and starts to wear warm again on people’s bare arms” and a freak spring blizzard leaves “a covering of inches such that the strongest tulips find themselves peeking out of ice.” It’s also a place that offers few opportunities for its black residents, and where violence is always a possibility. Through the two girls eyes’, we see their Kentucky hometown. These are all difficult tricks to pull off, but Townsend executes them effortlessly. What’s more, she shifts the story’s setting back and forth between the Jim Crow-era South and Harlem. She writes from both Audrey’s and Caroline’s point of view, and the book is set in the late 1950s. For her debut novel, Saint Monkey, Jacinda Townsend has done both of them. One is a setting in a period of American history that’s more than 50 years in the past the other is a story told from the point of view of two or more narrators. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.Two things tend to worry me in novels by authors I’ve never read before. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky.

There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own.

Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief.

Saint monkey by jacinda townsend