www.naomi-jackson.com
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Dear Readers,
Thank you so much for choosing The Star Side of Bird Hill for your book club!
The Star Side of Bird Hill is the story of a family torn apart by loss and pieced back together by love. It’s the
summer of 1989: Phaedra Braithwaite is ten years old and her sister, Dionne, has just turned sixteen when
they are both sent from Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother, Hyacinth. Their emotionally
fragile mother, Avril, can no longer care for them, so their grandmother takes charge. When the girls’ father
arrives in Barbados with questionable intentions to bring them back to the United States, Phaedra and
Dionne confront the question of whether they will continue living in Barbados or return home.
I wrote the novel in order to explore the question that dogged me as a child. “What if my parents sent me
home and never came back for me?” I grew up in New York City, but my family traveled home often to the
Caribbean. Sometimes my parents would drop us off for the summer as soon as school let out and joke that
they might not come back for us. Writing Star Side was a way to explore that “what if” question.
I also wanted to examine what it feels like to identify strongly with a culture or country where you might
be considered an outsider. I felt this way often, the dissonance of “feeling” Caribbean, while not being
Caribbean enough when I traveled home to Antigua and Barbados. A lot of the book concerns who’s on
the inside and who is on the periphery of a community through descriptions of the insular Bird Hill and
characters like Phaedra, Dionne, Hyacinth, and Avril’s close friends, Jean and Mrs. Loving.
In this book you’ll discover one memorable matriarchal family. I hope that you’ll find something in their
relationships and experiences that resonates with you. The book confronts a lot of the questions that are
still relevant for me today. What does it mean to love someone as they are? How can we make space to
acknowledge and forgive people’s shortcomings, including our own? What are the challenges and drawbacks
of straddling two cultures? What is the purpose and place of religion in our lives? How does mental illness
affect not only the person who is sick but also the people who love them?
Writing The Star Side of Bird Hill has been a bittersweet and exhilarating process. Over the course of the
last six years since I first started writing the book, I have graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and
worked on Star Side in cities as different as Brooklyn, Bridgetown, Iowa City, Philadelphia, and Cassis in
the South of France. I also lost my grandmother, who lived in Barbados, and whose life, home, and sense of
humor deeply informed the book. The best part of working on this book was spending an entire summer in
Barbados writing and learning more about the island where my mother’s family is from. I have shared some
pictures from my trip here.
I hope that you enjoy the novel, and that it will spark some lively and fun discussion in your book club!
Best,
Praise For
The Star Side of Bird Hill
“A bittersweet coming-of-age tale of heartbreak and loss…Jackson’s story becomes stronger and
stronger as we get to know these characters. The themes she touches on—mental illness, immigration,
motherhood, sexual awakening—are potent and deftly juggled, anchored in the vivid locale of Bird Hill yet
universally relatable. Readers will be turning the pages to follow Phaedra and Dionne’s memorable journey.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The writing is especially fine, with even minor characters benefiting from Jackson’s lyrical descriptions…
[The Star Side of Bird Hill] recall[s] Toni Morrison’s Love.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Many moments of awareness…permeate this delightful debut novel. An engrossing and poignant comingof-age story populated with engaging, well-drawn characters.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Rich in the aspect and feel of the Caribbean…A charming, laid-back bildungsroman and an uplifting
story about the importance of a stable, loving home and the embrace of one’s culture.” —Booklist
“Jackson has written a first novel full of heart and heartbreak, a novel about going home, about the ties that
bind three generations of women across years and despite absence. It is a bittersweet lesson in learning
to recognize love.” —Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
“The Star Side of Bird Hill reads as if we’re let in on a sometimes wonderful, sometimes thrilling,
sometimes terrible secret. It’s the unwritten history of women without men, of girls in conflict with
themselves and the damage—and healing that can come from the same place: Family.”
—Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Naomi Jackson has written a tender novel exploring the complexities of motherhood and childhood. The Star
Side of Bird Hill holds together opposing elements—the book is quiet in the telling, but the story being
told is sharp and vibrant. It is as much a story of the fears of childhood as it is a story about welcoming
old age with optimism. A book that knows death and discovery. A book laced with pain but shimmering with
hope. With care, the narrative addresses huge issues such as mental illness, mortality, sexuality and, at its
very core, what it means to love another person as they are.”
—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning
“Naomi Jackson packs a hell of a lot of love and death and magic into this wonderful debut. The Star Side
of Bird Hill travels between Barbados and Brooklyn telling the story of a family, and a people, who move
between worlds and world views. But really this is the story of one young girl named Phaedra who is trying
her best in a world that doesn’t always see the best in her. There are touches of Jamaica Kincaid and J. D.
Salinger here, but Naomi Jackson is an artist all her own.”
—Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
© Lola Flash
Q&A with Naomi
What compelled you to write this book?
I grew up in a predominantly West Indian neighborhood in Brooklyn and spent summers in Barbados (where
my mother’s from) and in Antigua (where my father’s from) with my sister and a gang of cousins. It was in
Barbados and Antigua that I first understood the trickiness of the hyphen between Caribbean and American,
that I could be as much an outsider there as in Brooklyn. I can remember being teased mercilessly for my
Yankee accent. During those long, hot days, I became a voracious reader, the first step towards becoming
a writer. I wrote The Star Side of Bird Hill to explore these experiences and to examine issues that are
important to me, namely family, mental illness, sexuality, religion. Writing the book was also a way to
answer a question that always dogged me: What would happen if, like my parents sometimes joked, they
sent me home to the Caribbean for the summer, and left me there for good?
How did your childhood straddling different cultures and geographies influence the book?
I definitely struggled with feeling like an outsider, not feeling Caribbean enough when I traveled home to
Antigua and Barbados. Now, I have a better understanding of the material and experiential differences of
living in the Caribbean vs. in the States, for example, the privilege of being able to travel on an American
passport. I used to be bothered by the discomfort, but I have come to see my status as an outsider as a gift.
It certainly has helped my writing. When I traveled to Barbados to research the book, being perceived as
an outsider gave me an excuse to switch into “learning mode,” asking questions as I tried to understand the
rhythms of speech and culture of Barbados. Being an outsider means that there’s little I take for granted;
my unique perspective straddling cultures has trained my ear and eye to listen and look for what’s truly
interesting and peculiar about a particular place.
You describe Dionne early on as “sixteen going on a bitter, if beautiful, forty-five.” She’s
exasperated with her new home and acts out, yet her grief and anger toward her mother and
grandmother run true and deep. She’s caught right in between childhood and adulthood—a
moment in one’s young life that is both claustrophobic in experience and universally understood
by anyone even a few years past it. Can you talk about getting into Dionne’s head? Did you
revisit your teenage years when developing her character?
With Dionne, I wanted to explore all the emotions at work inside her—grieving the loss of her mother,
the discomfort of being unburdened of responsibility for her younger sister, missing her friends and life
in Brooklyn, and feeling out of step with Barbados and her grandmother’s rules. I was an angst-ridden
teenager, so I had plenty of material to work with when I was crafting Dionne’s character. I certainly drew
on that experience when I was writing Star Side, and I think that anyone who’s survived their teenage years
can relate to this book.
Phaedra, at ten years old, adjusts more readily, absorbing stories from Hyacinth and eagerly
exploring her new home. How did you imagine Phaedra’s experience of Bird Hill versus her
older sister?
I have an older sister to whom I am very close, and I am always struck by how different we are and how
differently we experience exactly the same events. Since Phaedra is a nerd with few friends back home in
Brooklyn, she doesn’t have as much to lose in coming to Barbados. In fact, she comes to love her new friends,
Chris and Donna, and finds solace in her grandmother’s company. I imagined that a younger child would be
more open to spending time with her grandmother and seeing the beauty and intrigue in new surroundings.
For Phaedra, spending time in Bird Hill, where her mother grew up, allows her to feel closer to her mother,
Avril.
Bird Hill is a real place in Barbados. How much of the Bird Hill in your novel is informed by the
actual place, and what was created through your writing and the eyes of the girls?
The real Bird Hill is in a community called Haggatt Hall in St. Michael, Barbados. My grandmother lived
there, and I visited her there when she was still alive. I can definitely see the ways that the real Bird Hill
influenced the Bird Hill of the novel, but there are important differences. The Bird Hill in the novel is rural,
and more reflective of the less developed place that I visited in the 1980s than the Bird Hill that exists now.
(For example, there’s a printing shop where there used to be a pig shed.) There are some sweet similarities
though—my granny’s house really did have the words Why Worry? written on the threshold, there is a
gorgeous grove of guava trees, and my grandmother’s beloved church still stands today, at the top of a slight
incline.
In some ways, The Star Side of Bird Hill is about the myriad ways in which families—parents,
children, siblings, grandparents—struggle, all their lives, to understand one another. How did
you approach writing about this family?
Family is tricky. There can be so many misunderstandings and so much trauma bound up with our
experiences of the first people who are meant to love us and keep us safe. I wanted to write a book that
illustrated the complexity of one family at one moment in time, without coming to any easy conclusions
about how they overcome the circumstances they find themselves in. In my personal life, I’m both close
to my family and very aware of the hard work we have done (and continue to do) to maintain both our
independence and our relationships to each other. With this book, I wanted to offer up some of what I
experienced and figured out about family to people who were thinking and feeling through these things for
themselves.
Why did you choose to set the book in 1989?
I had a variety of personal, political, and historical reasons for setting the book in 1989. The summer of
1989 was an important one for me personally, as it was the year that my sister and I began living with our
father and stepmother after years of being raised by our mother. It was a radical shift after which nothing
in my life was ever the same. More broadly, 1989 saw the election of David Dinkins as the first black mayor
of New York City, a couple years before the Crown Heights riots. It was also the height of the AIDS crisis
and AIDS activism in New York City; 100,000 AIDS cases were reported in the United States that year. My
relationship to the Caribbean changed in the wake of 1988’s Hurricane Gilbert, which wreaked havoc across
the region, especially in Jamaica. Setting the book in 1989 allowed me to feed off these touchstones in my
personal life and in the history of New York City and the Caribbean. Finally, I wanted to set the book in the
late 1980s because that was the Barbados that I visited as a child.
Avril sends Dionne and Phaedra to live with Hyacinth after she can no longer care for them.
Throughout the book, we see glimpses into their past lives in Brooklyn and how Avril retreated
further and further into herself and Dionne took on the responsibility of caring for her mother
and sister. Can you describe your approach to writing about mental illness and how it is
experienced by Avril and those who love her?
Writing about Avril’s mental illness was one of the things that I worked hard to get right. I wanted to make
sure that readers would see Avril’s tenderness as a mother, her desire to do right by her children, and
witness with compassion the ways in which she falls short of her best intentions. I wanted to focus less on
diagnosis, medication, episodes, etc., and more on the children’s experiences of Avril’s illness—the ways that
the girls are affected by her neglect and eventually forced to parent each other and themselves. I also wanted
to show Hyacinth’s helplessness and regret in the face of her daughter’s illness and the distance between
them. Overall, I was determined to show how families are affected by mental illness, and to show readers
that people with mental illness are both worthy and capable of love.
Tell us about Jean. Why do you introduce him to readers through Phaedra’s eyes?
Jean is one of my favorite characters in the book, and I hope that readers will come to love him as much as
I did. He’s one of Avril’s close friends, and I thought that Phaedra would try to work through some of her
grief about her mother’s passing by spending time with people who knew her. I introduced Jean through
Phaedra’s eyes because she’s kind, and curious, and therefore the character who was least likely to be
judgmental of Jean, who is gay, and the son of a sex worker.
Back in Brooklyn, “Dionne had learned from her mother that if you wanted to keep a man,
he should love you at least a little bit more than you loved him.” (p. 49) Tell us about Dionne’s
relationships to the boys and men she meets in the book.
Dionne’s most important relationship with a man is the strained one that she has with her father, Errol,
who abandons the family when she is still a child. At the risk of sounding corny, I think that Dionne is
searching for her father in her flirtations and the relationships she has with boys. She dates a lot when she
first arrives in Bird Hill – there’s the son of the local pastor, Trevor, a boy she meets at the church picnic,
Chad, and then a guy she meets at the Grand Kadooment Day parade during Crop Over. It takes her the
entirety of the summer, and seeing the extent of her father’s failings as a man and as a parent, for Dionne to
learn to stop grasping for sexual attention from boys, and instead to meet both the boys she likes and herself
on the firm ground of friendship. It’s important to me that readers experience Dionne’s sexual awakening as
a natural part of her growing up, rather than judge her.
Hyacinth signs the girls up for Vacation Bible School upon their arrival, because she believes
“idle hands were the devil’s playground.” Religion and church activities are threaded
throughout the novel—how do you feel religion serves our main three characters?
I grew up in a religious family, so it’s no surprise that religion shows up in the book. I was an acolyte in
my Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, and my grandmother shuttled us off to Vacation Bible School (VBS) in
Antigua. For a long time, I wanted to be a priest. For Hyacinth, the church is a way for her to connect with
her friends and draw strength in the face of her trials, and VBS is a way to keep her granddaughters out of
her hair and out of trouble. For Phaedra, prayer and hymns and the church are a way to draw closer to her
mother. Dionne finds the church confining and prescriptive, though I imagine that her relationship to church
and relationship might change as she grows older.
At the heart of the book is this unforgettable matriarchal family. What does it mean to you
to create these earnest, hardened, funny, grieving, loving—in a word, complicated—female
characters on the page?
I aimed to create characters who were every bit as complex as the women who raised me and the women who
I have chosen as friends. I also wanted to pay homage to the matriarchal family structure that’s common in
the Caribbean but often lamented for its lack of strong male figures. I think there’s a lot to celebrate in the
ways that knowledge and love and joy are shared within these families. I believe the book will resonate with
anyone who’s had a complicated relationship with their sister, mother, or grandmother, or the place that
they call home.
Discussion Questions
1. What is your impression of Bird Hill? How do Dionne and Phaedra adjust to their new home?
2. W
hy, in the first chapter, does Chris throw the rock at Phaedra’s head? How does it reflect their families’
different beliefs and upbringings?
3. D
o you think that Dionne is justified in acting out against her grandmother? Why or why not? How would
you have acted in her situation?
4. H
ow do the sisters differ in their reactions to their father’s return? What is Hyacinth’s take on this
development?
5. W
hat happens during the parade between Dionne’s father and Jean? How does Dionne’s perception of her
father change afterwards?
6. W
e see flashbacks to Dionne and Phaedra’s lives with Avril in Brooklyn. Discuss what is happening to
Avril. What do you think they understood about Avril’s illness? How do their responsibilities change
when they move in with Hyacinth?
7. What is your impression of Avril's time in Bird Hill? Discuss Avril’s relationship to Hyacinth.
8. “ It wasn’t so much that Hyacinth wanted someone to lean on, because Hyacinth was more than capable of
standing upright in the face of the most difficult things, even her husband’s death. Hyacinth just wanted
to know that she could shift her weight to one side and it wouldn’t be just the air and the force of her will
holding her up, but the support of her family too. Hyacinth thought life was not just easier, but sweeter
with family by her side. That’s what she’d been raised up to believe, and what her heart told her was still
true now. She wondered why she hadn’t been able to pass this truth on to her own daughter. She wanted
to know whether and how her grandchildren might learn this for themselves.” (p. 115)
Discuss this passage. In what ways do the generations within this family struggle to understand one
another? What is your experience with your own family?
9. P
haedra accompanies Hyacinth on her visits as a midwife and a practitioner of obeah. What do you think
Phaedra takes away from these experiences?
10. Why do you think Hyacinth tells Dionne the story about Bertha (p. 281-286)?
11. H
ow does Dionne and Phaedra’s relationship with their grandmother evolve over the course of the book?
How does Hyacinth change?
Rum Cocktail Recipe
BA RB AD OS RU M PU NC H
kbook
from Rita G. Springer's Caribbean Coo
Ingredients:
One part pure lime juice (¼ cup)
Two parts sugar (½ cup)
Three parts Barbados rum (¾ cup)
Four parts water (1 cup)
Method:
juice. Blend well.
Dissolve sugar in water, add rum and lime
es 4 servings.
Chill and serve with bitters or nutmeg. Mak
Recommended Reading List
Soul Kiss by Shay Youngblood
Soul Kiss is one of my all-time favorite books. It tells
the story of a little girl, Mariah Santos, who’s shuttled
between the care of her mother and aunts in the
South, and her father who’s a painter in Los Angeles.
I regularly reread Soul Kiss and drew inspiration from
it when I was writing The Star Side of Bird Hill.
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
Before encountering Jacqueline Woodson’s books, I’d
never read young adult fiction set in a Brooklyn so
much like the place where I grew up, and featuring
such a diverse cast of characters. I enjoyed reading
Woodson’s memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming and cheered
when it won the 2014 National Book Award.
Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood by June Jordan
I love this beautifully written, heartrending
memoir by renowned poet, June Jordan. I especially
appreciated that Jordan writes about places I’ve
actually visited, including St. Philip’s Episcopal
church and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Macon
Street branch in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
I read Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John for the first
time when I was a child. I adored the book’s gorgeous
narration, and was enthralled by the overlap between
the world of the feisty girl in this book, and the stories
my father told me about his experiences growing up in
Antigua.
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
I felt a thrill of recognition when I first read Paule
Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones as a teenager.
I loved seeing Brooklyn’s Barbadian-American
community in the 1950s through the eyes of the fierce
young female protagonist, Selina Boyce.
72 Hour Hold by Bebe Moore Campbell
I was riveted by Bebe Moore Campbell’s novel 72
Hour Hold. The book explores the lives of Keri and
her bipolar teenage daughter, Trina. This was the first
book I ever encountered that explored mental illness
within an African-American family.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
I’ve been a fan of Sherman Alexie for years, and I
especially enjoyed his first foray into young adult
fiction with this novel about a teenage protagonist
growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in
Washington State. I see some resonance between
Arnold Spirit Jr.’s struggles integrating into a
predominantly white high school, and Phaedra and
Dionne’s rough acclimatization to Barbados.
Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama by Alison
Bechdel
The follow up to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (now a
Broadway musical) is her fabulous graphic novel, Are
You My Mother? I’ve never read a more thoughtful
or funnier take on the complicated relationships that
creative people have with the women who made them.
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I thoroughly enjoyed the books Adichie has since
written, especially Americanah and her epic Half
of A Yellow Sun. But Adichie’s debut novel, Purple
Hibiscus will always have a special place in my heart.
It tells the story of Kambili and her brother Jaja who
escape the tyrannical rule of their father and forsake
the comfortable city life to which they’ve grown
accustomed to spend time with their aunt in the
Nigerian countryside. I especially appreciated the way
Adichie incorporates religion in this novel.
Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie
Yanique
I devoured Yanique’s family saga set in the U.S.
Virgin Islands over the course of a few feverish days
last summer. The writing here is exquisite, and the
novel is a landmark story of family and love. It’s also
an excellent primer on the politics and history of
colonialism in the Caribbean. Readers who love short
stories will enjoy Yanique’s first collection, How to
Escape from a Leper Colony.
STREET SIGN FROM
THE REAL BIRD HILL
BATHSHEBA ROCKS
PICTURE OF MY
GRANNY'S HOUSE
THE SUGAR MILL
Photographs by Naomi Jackson and Angela Cohen
SURFERS CAFE/BEACH VIEW
FROM OISTINS