CC Book Club Review
Book Reading: The White Woman on the Green Bicycle – Monique Roffey
May – June 2022
Antonio Arch
Cayman Connection’s Book Club has grown from an idea shared with me by Cayman Connection ED Kate Kandiah into a little community of students, readers, and writers with remarkable speed.
The governing goals and guidelines that make up Book Club’s mission practically wrote themselves, reflecting the reading goals and habits of its three founding chairs with a surprising harmony. Kate’s love and knowledge of Caribbean literature gained during graduate studies in the field, combined with her mission to unite Caymanians studying and living abroad and build a community with services and programmes that enrich.
With so many young people in our community choosing their studies to prepare for careers in the financial services industry, Rita’s dedication to the arts and experience in cultural heritage preservation is unique and invaluable, reinforcing our common shared beliefs in the value of the humanities across life and society. We have approached the project from three unique directions, but surprising common ground. Hopefully my interest in fiction, focus on writing and storytelling’s importance across industry, government and the third sector round us out.
We’ve certainly reached consensus with our scheduled and suggested reading lists. They combine local voices, emerging talent, and the regions’ important writing. Chosen books hopefully entertain, inspire discussion of familiar themes and issues in Caymanian life, offer broad historical and social scenarios that might improve understanding of the Caribbean, and our place within it. Some of the books recommended might offer something of island cultures, similar and unfamiliar, that help to inspire a conversation about our own Caymanianness.
Our first two gatherings were well received, including a launch event featuring unpublished works by living legend J.A. Roy Bodden, followed by a reading and discussion of Andrea Levy’s Small Island. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle seems like the appropriate next choice.
Monique Roffey’s award-winning novel spans the eventful half century from 1956 (eight years after the story told in Small Island)…