MY MOTHER'S HOUSE by Francesca Momplaisir - Booklist Review

Booklist | November 1, 2020

It opens with the mellifluous Dion Graham and ends with an always-appreciated who-read-whom at recording’s end. In between, the horror is unrelenting, yet the three narrators persist with tenacious dignity and grace. Graham enthralls as the titular “my mother’s house”—Kay Manman Mwen in Kreyòl—the Queens, New York home of Lucien and Marie-Ange, a once “compassionate and savvy young couple,” who initially provided a haven for fellow Haitian immigrants. Their needs, his help, feeds Lucien’s power as he transforms La Kay into a house of hidden torture chambers. The house, calling itself La Kay, appoints itself witness and judge, plotting vengeance when it can bear Lucien’s depravity no more. The provocative casting of a female narrator—the impressive Karen Chilton—for Lucien’s sections becomes a rebellious, reclamatory act of giving voice to the countless women manipulated, hunted, tormented, and enslaved in the too-many decades Lucien has thrived. Janina Edwards achingly haunts as Sol, the sole prisoner allowed narrative agency, whose survival—and that of her basement-born son—is anything but guaranteed. Debut novelist Momplaisir’s already unnerving nightmare on-the-page morphs into aural terror, most definitely not for the casual listener. Content warnings, yes: a chilling lesson in inhumanity—private and public both.

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