“I’ve missed you too. I’ve been missing you for ages.”
Lisa Smith’s Jamaica Road (Knopf 2025) is a heartbreaking debut of a love story that is very much time and place. Set primarily in South London, Jamaica Road opens in 1981 with a young Daphne. Daphne is the only Black girl in her class, and her goal is to be as unnoticed as possible. She does not want to call attention to herself now that the name calling has pretty much stopped. Enter Connie Small, a tall boy from Jamaica that the teachers pair with Daphne because she is of Jamaican descent. He becomes a target for her classmates’s racism.
What follows is the slowest burn of a friends to lovers. But it’s that friendship and the struggles the two face that build the foundation of their relationship. Connie and his mother have overstayed their visas and are subject to removal from the country. His mother is in a relationship with an abusive man who promises to marry her and get their citizenship. With each bruise, they hang on that promise. Daphne struggles with her finding her father, and Connie helps.
During this time period of the ‘80s, London runs rampant with racism, attacks, and the rounding up of people who don’t have current legal status. Smith captures the shift in young children to young adults clinging to the hatred of their family with portrayals of Daphne’s classmates, particularly Mark, who is modeling his older brother while still struggling with his own beliefs and attraction to Daphne. It also captures Daphne’s struggles of wanting to fit in with her English classmates and her attraction to Mark.
Connie and Daphne grow up, grow apart because of a decision she makes, and grow back together. When Connie returns to Jamaica for a funeral, she joins him. I wish there’d been more to that section as it was beautiful, and its beauty made what follows even more heartbreaking.
This is fantastic debut. I may have hated the ending, but the ending is the ending it needed.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 