It all works out for the 'Inner City Girl'

• Title: Inner City Girl
• Author: Colleen Smith-Dennis
• Publisher: LMH Publishing Ltd.
• Reviewer: Barbara Nelson

Jamaica-born high school English teacher Colleen Smith-Dennis' first book Inner City Girl is a delightful story. In parts, it is quite absorbing and heart-warming.

It centres on Martina, a poor, "Milo complexioned 11-year-old" girl from the bowels of the inner city who lives with her mother, her 14-year-old brother, Shimron, and her 10-year-old sister, Yvette, in a yard in town.

The story begins with Martina's mother, the bold, brazen, Miss Fuller, expressing her great distress at Martina's impending entry into the prestigious Milverton High, "the school inna big class people area" instead of going to a school "down ya so!" - a school like Rockwell Comprehensive.

Martina, an intelligent, studious child, spent much of her time thinking and reading. Unlike the rest of her family, she preferred to bathe in the big plastic bath in the tiny kitchen rather than in the little concrete square outside that passed for a communal bathroom. There were three families in the yard and they all used the same bathroom. After she had a bath she would pour out the water on the gravel by the side of the house.

In her worry about the impending expense to send Martina to Milverton, Miss Fuller moans and groans: "Me no have dem kind a money deh!"

But, somehow, the money is found. Martina finds herself at the high school on the first day of the new term accompanied by her mother. Miss Fuller wore an "orange wig, which matched her loud orange and purple straight dress, orange tights, high orange boots and purple false nails and lipstick".

Martina was very embarrassed at her mother's appearance. Her negative feelings were only made worse when she observed the kind of clothes that the other mothers wore. Most of them "were quietly dressed in soft shades or earth colours and subtle florals".

The other students wore expensive shoes and brand-name accessories. Her own ugly, cheap shoes were a source of great amusement for some of the other students. They promptly named them "Boat boot".

The story takes Martina and her family through a series of situations, many of which could have broken the spirit of the young girl. Daily, she had to endure the suggestive looks and lewd words of the idle boys who lived near her house. She was often weak and hungry from lack of proper nourishing food - dinner was always rice, rice with chicken back, or tin mackerel, or corned beef or callaloo.

Then there was the problem of her dysfunctional family. The three siblings had three different fathers - Yvette's father gave her mother a "little fowl-feeding" every couple of weeks. Martina's father was nowhere in sight and neither was Shimron's. As the story develops Yvette's father is unmasked as a real villain and has to leave the island before the police caught up with him.

Intertwined with the main theme of Martina's driving ambition to succeed in high school against tremendous odds are the tales of her mother's ongoing illness, Yvette's emotional breakdown after having to spend some time with her father, Shimron's dangerous involvement in peddling drugs and an attempted abduction of Martina by the pock-marked taxi driver, 'Dragon'.

Late in the story Martina's father suddenly turns up after we learn that her mother "was working at him house as a helper when him get me pregnant". He was then a married man.

His wife suspected that something was going on and told her to leave. "When a tell him bout you him threaten to shoot me if a ever call his name," Martina's mother told her.

It is a very complex and convoluted situation for a young girl to find herself in. Yet, author Smith-Dennis brings all the strands of the story together to make the book a good read.

As Martina's friend and benefactor, Miss Turner said to her when her erstwhile father suddenly walked into her life: "This one will have to work out. It have to work out."

It all works out for the Inner City Girl.

The story takes Martina and her family through a series of situations, many of which could have broken the spirit of the young girl.