A Review of Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow

Christine Barrow, who made Barbados her home for nearly fifty years, delivers a masterclass in short fiction’s powers of subtlety with her first book, Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow. These stories do not declaim so much as they stitch, quietly and with stunning resolve, a Barbadian tapestry as complicated as it is unsentimentally beautiful. You will find it difficult to dispute that these characters could be anything but real: the strong grandmothers brined in superstitions and regrets; the world-weary women who both keep and resent each other’s domestic secrets; the fisherman who knows to his detriment that the sea can be dangerous. Threaded in with menace is a hard-won ease, a sense that “the love going round and coming round will keep you safe.”

This review first appeared in Caribbean Beat Magazine Issue 155, January/February 2019, at https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-155/bookshelf-jan-feb-2019#ixzz6dEK...