Minding Ben

Set in the lead-up to the racially turbulent summer of 1991 and Brooklyn's Crown Heights riots, this troubling and touching novel chronicles 18-year-old Grace's move from Trinidad to New York City in search of work and new opportunities, but her Sunday-through-Friday life as a live-in nanny is all the more stark when set against her weekends with a dirt-poor family that needs her just as surely as her demanding employers. Cinderella's wicked step-family have nothing on married-into-money Miriam, who runs Grace ragged with selfish demands, or haggard, penny-pinching Sylvia, stuck in a wretched apartment back in Brooklyn with three kids and unemployed baby-daddy Bo. Everyone shares desperation: Grace for a green card, Sylvia for a future, Miriam for acceptance. The language of the Caribbean sings through the pages, and if the adults misbehave and mismanage their lives, your heart breaks for the kids—Miriam's son, Ben, and the other Manhattan kids watched over by hired help who have their own codes of behavior in the parks and playgrounds. A too-tidy ending wraps it all up with a bow of hope, but the striving and sadness that precedes it is what sticks. (Apr.)