Tea by the Sea: A Novel

by Donna Hemans

Overview

A woman searches for the daughter who was taken from her long ago in “a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences” (Marlon James, National Book Award finalist and author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf).

To find the daughter taken from her, Plum Valentine must first locate the child’s father, who walked out of a hospital with the day-old baby girl without explanation. Seventeen years later, weary of her unfruitful search, Plum sees an article in a community newspaper with a photo of the man for whom she has spent half her life searching. He has become an Episcopal priest. Her plan: confront him and walk away with the daughter he took from her. From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces Plum’s circuitous route to find her daughter—and explores how Plum’s and the priest’s love came apart.

“The forbidden love story of Plum and Lenworth comes alive in this heart-rending novel . . . heady twists and turns delivered in an urgent and beautiful prose.” —Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of Book of the Little Axe

“A moving portrait of identity, belonging, family, immigration, and the power of maternal love.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597098533
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	06/10/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novel River Woman, winner of the 2003–4 Towson University Prize for Literature. Tea by the Sea, for which she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature, is her second novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, and the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad, among others. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Read an Excerpt

Book Excerpt—1

Anchovy in those days was quiet, a little slip of a town seven miles from Montego Bay on the main road from Reading on the north coast to Savanna-la-Mar on the south coast. Except for a bird sanctuary off the main road that led to Anchovy, rafting on the Lethe River, and an abandoned railway station, Anchovy and the small towns immediately surrounding it weren’t known for much. Anchovy wasn’t a market town, not like Brown’s Town, which Lenworth had just left and which swelled on market days—Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays—with vendors from nearby and faraway towns, who spread out beyond the covered market in makeshift stalls along the road or simply pushed their bunched or packaged goods at potential customers with a plea or a price. Even a Thursday afternoon in Brown’s Town when stores shut early to prepare for the Friday and Saturday afternoon swell of customers felt more alive than Anchovy did. But the relative quiet of the town wasn’t what mattered. What did? Plum wouldn’t find him there. Really, no one would look in that particular location for Lenworth since he had only an indirect connection to Anchovy through distant relatives. More importantly, it was not a connection his immediate family members or acquaintances would know.

Book Excerpt—2

What Plum thought in that moment was not how Lenworth and Pauline would deal with the child’s outburst—dismissal from the table? A stern talking-to?—but how Lenworth had wiped away her life. She was no more than the scribbles on a chalkboard, removed with a single downward swipe leaving only tiny particles swirling in the air, landing indiscriminately on everything within reach. Had he looked at her that night in the hospital—still fatigued from labor, drowsy from medication—and seen a dying woman or a woman struggling to live? And she had struggled. And she had lived, pushed and pulled and willed herself to climb from the weakness pulling her under, struggled until she regained the normal rhythm of breathing, and came out on top. She had lived to hold the baby she wanted to call Marissa, had lived to look up at him and smile, triumphant.

Her smile hadn’t mattered.

He declared her dead and walked away with her child.

Editorial Reviews

“Tea By the Sea is a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences, all told with spellbinding, shattering power. Hemans doesn't just fulfill the promise of her debut— she soars past it."
—Marlon James, Man Booker Prize Winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Op-ed in Electric Literature

The forbidden love story of Plum and Lenworth comes alive in this heart-rending novel, Tea by the Sea. Hemans has a stunning ability to give words to that elusive feeling of emptiness, and the longing for redemption is palpable. In Hemans’s deft hands, regrets are explored with precision and compassion so that the reader finds herself unable to turn against even characters who have committed the most wretched betrayals. Tea by the Sea is like the story told in a grandmother’s kitchen with the odors of fried dumplings and saltfish wafting into mouths that are set agape at the heady twists and turns delivered in an urgent and beautiful prose.
—Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of ’Til the Well Runs Dry

Tea by the Sea is an insightful and illuminating prism of a novel, deftly examining familial identity and personal transformation. Hemans turns the kaleidoscope, catching light at different angles, to show us how one person’s act of honor and responsibility can also be an act of unspeakable betrayal.
—Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel and Harmony

"Tea by the Sea is a well-written novel exploring the themes of agency, love, and loss."—LynnDee Wathen, Booklist

"A deftly crafted and entertaining work of impressive literary nuance, Tea by the Sea by Donna Hemans is an extraordinary, original, and inherently fascinating novel."—Midwest Book Review

A Conversation in the Washington Independent Review of Books

An interview with Aimee Liu in The Rumpus

An interview in New York State Writers Institute

Spring 2020 Blog Tour

(Reviews, interviews, and more)

Week 1

• The Livre Café | 6/1
• Jessica Belmont | 6/2
• Fiction Matters | 6/3
• Everyday I Write The Book | 6/4
• Rebel Women Lit | 6/5
• Never Without A Book | 6/6
• The Book Decoder | 6/7

Week 2

• Book of Cinz | 6/8
• Nurse Bookie | 6/9
• This Brown Girl Reads | 6/10
• Jennifer Tarheel Reader | 6/11
• Book Reviews and More by Kathy | 6/12
• Girl Who Reads | 6/13

Week 3

• Suzy Approved Book Reviews | 6/14
• Blunt Scissors Book Review | 6/15
• Syllables of Swathi | 6/16
• Collector of Book Boyfriends | 6/17
• Gimme The Scoop Reviews | 6/18
• Audio Killed the Bookmark | 6/19
• Miss Bibliofancy | 6/20

Week 4

• Gail Renatta | 6/21
• Chocolate Covered Pages | 6/22
• Storybook Reviews | 6/23
• Long and Short Reviews | 6/24
• BNJ Reads | 6/25
• What Is That Book About | 6/26
• Eno Books | 6/27

Week 5

• Beth’s Book Nook Blog | 6/28
• Reading Between the Wines Book Club | 6/29
• Amy’s Booket List | 6/30
• Book and Pen In Hand | 7/1
• Bree McIvor | 7/2
• Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus More | 7/3
• Karukerament | 7/4
• Suzanne Bhagan | 7/6

In beautiful, wrenching prose, Hemans’ Tea by the Sea tells an unforgettably moving story of family love, identity, and betrayal.
—G.P. Gottlieb, author of ’ Whipped and Sipped mystery series.

"Don’t expect a facile morality play: Hemans writes with precision about the most private bacchanals of the heart, the utter vexations of the spirit. Read with a rum-soaked handkerchief."—Shivanee Ramlochan, Caribbean Beat

Podcast interview featured by LitHub.

Featured in the Manhattan Book Review.

Featured by Without Books

A Poets and Writers and Bare Life Review featured author.

Featured in Literary Hub's "5 Books You May Have Missed in June"

Featured in Matt Witt's Blog

Featured in Women's National Book Association 2020 Great Group Reads Selections

Essay featured in The Millions

Personal essay in Ploughshares

Featured on Fordham Magazine

Winner of Rebel Women Lit Caribbean Readers' Award

Shortlisted for the Story Circle's Women's Book Awards

Featured on Electric Lit

From the Publisher

06/01/2020

In this second novel from Jamaican American author Hemans (River Woman), set in both Jamaica and Brooklyn, 24-year-old Jamaican high school tutor Lenworth gets a student named Plum Valentine pregnant; he agrees to marry her but then absconds with the baby girl hours after her birth. (This information is no spoiler, as it's revealed in Chapter 1.) Lenworth starts a new life with his daughter on another part of the island, using an assumed name. Though Plum was raised in America, her Jamaican parents parked her in a Jamaican boarding school against her will; after Lenworth disappears with the baby, she returns grief-stricken to Brooklyn and spends years trying to track down her daughter. The narrative is replete with wonderfully evocative descriptions of Jamaica's lush floral beauty, hot climate, and rugged terrain, as well as more sober assessments of its local poverty, but the story is melodramatic when it could have been a more critical take on the Caribbean American immigrant experience. Plot and tone don't quite jibe: Lenworth is presented as a sympathetic character with Plum's best interests in mind, but readers will have difficulty reconciling that portrayal with his despicable behavior. VERDICT A light read, despite the book's serious-sounding themes.—Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal

2020-03-15
A young mother goes on a quest to track down the father of her child, who abducted their baby daughter shortly after her birth.

When Plum Valentine is in high school in Brooklyn, her immigrant parents plan a seemingly routine visit to their native Jamaica. Once there, however, the parents insist that Plum stay behind, leaving her at a strict boarding school to keep her from getting into trouble. As it turns out, trouble manages to find the pretty 17-year-old anyway. After Lenworth, a 25-year-old chemistry lab assistant, tutors Plum, the two end up having an illicit relationship. As the novel opens, Plum is in the hospital, recovering from having given birth to their daughter, when she discovers that Lenworth has abducted the baby. Plum realizes she has been abandoned yet again. But that pain pales in comparison to the yawning emptiness she experiences at the loss of her child. Traveling back to Brooklyn, Plum tries to set her life back on a path to normalcy. Determined to find her daughter, however, she sets off repeatedly, over the course of more than a decade, to track her ex-lover and their little girl. Hemans delivers a cat-and-mouse chase that brings Plum back to Jamaica over and over again even as she leads a parallel life in the United States. The taut storyline sacrifices character development with the net result that both Plum and Lenworth come across as caricatures, their motivations and desires one-dimensional and murky till the end. Lenworth’s sudden embrace of spirituality as he realizes his profound error of judgment also feels forced. By concentrating mostly on the minutiae of the chase, the narrative misses mining the deeper emotional range it could have achieved had it addressed Plum’s grief with more nuance.

A tightly knit story about a mother’s loss that too often veers into melodrama.

Kirkus Reviews