Dog Heart is the first book I finished reading in 2013, and it's a good one. You can read some reviews here.
I knew a lot of Dexter's when I lived in Kingston; they came to the basketball court we'd helped them build--after school, Saturdays. McCaulay has so many details just right. The relentless heat, the smells, the all night noise, the crowded buses, the impossible conditions within Kingston's all age schools. And though I am not a middle class Jamaican single mother like the other main character (Sahara) in the novel, and though I knew much less about people like her, she strikes me as believable and more like me than I might care to admit. She sees a hungry boy and she wants to do more than give him a few coins this time. But her going beyond the few coins unintentionally sets the stage for an unhealthy one way dependency that becomes difficult to move beyond.
What I most like about the story is that it doesn't offer any easy answers, because there really aren't any. Kingston's ghettos are--what little I experienced of them, especially the one I knew best--are places in desperate need of worldview transformation as preparation for receptivity to the gospel. And yet there are more Christian churches in those ghettos per square mile than almost anywhere on earth.
I look back on my time in Kingston and I wonder what difference it made to the Dexter's I knew. I do not know. I also wonder what difference that time has made for me. I am still trying to figure that out.
p.s. We were missionaries in Jamaica from 1997-1999 with RENEWED ministries, a ministry committed to multiplication discipleship through sports ministry.
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