Sweetness in the Skin

Pumkin Patterson is thirteen and lives in a two-room house in Kingston, Jamaica. Her grandmother wants the family to rise in social standing, her Aunt Sophie dreams of a new life in Paris for the two of them, and her mother Paulette is rarely home.

When Sophie gets a work opportunity in France, she takes it and promises to send for Pumkin within a year. Pumkin only has to pass a French entrance exam so she can enrol in school there. Then her grandmother dies, leaving her alone with her volatile mother, and her estranged father turns up, as lazy and scheming as ever. Money gets tighter.

Pumkin decides to pay for the exam herself. She turns her love of baking into a real business, selling sweet potato pudding, coconut drops and chocolate cakes, and trade grows fast. But her school and her mother learn what she is doing, and everything she has built is at risk.

This is a coming-of-age novel with a comic streak and a sad one. It sits in a crowded, difficult family and asks what a good mother looks like. Pumkin works out who she is, what she can do and where she belongs.