Author, storyteller, Lorna Goodison.

Favourable reviews continue to come in for Jamaican poet/author Lorna Goodison' most recent book, From Harvey River, A Memoir of My Mother and her Island. These were done by The New York Times and The Washington Post in March.

The book has been getting much recognition since its release in 2007. On February 7, Goodison, who lives in both Toronto and Ann Arbor, Michigan, won the 2008 British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

The memoir chronicles her family's history and according to Lisa Fugard in The New York Times reveiw, Mama Goodie does the same for Jamaican history.

Describing Goodison's treatment of her mother and her immediate family, Fugard writes, "She had eight of them to contend with - and so do Goodison's readers. Not to worry. Being introduced to the cast of From Harvey River is like sitting down at a family dining table. You'll stay for the day and then on into the evening as each new character pulls up a chair. You could not be in better company."

Beautiful

Carolyn See, who reviewed the book for The Washington Post, in An Embroidered Family Heirloom, she writes, "Ah beautiful! Beautiful is the life Goodison evokes from the far-distant past: Jamaica as paradise, inhabited by West Africans ... Beautiful, the stories of her two white great-grandfathers: one, the upright William Harvey, who had a black wife and answered his critics by saying that "any woman who was good enough to share his bed was good enough for him to marry"; and the other, an Irish deserter who jumped ship, drank and hung around brothels on the island until he married into a wealthy Creole family, desperate to lighten the color of his decendants' skin."

For more, see: www.washingtonpost.com and www.nytimes.com.