ballantine books

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson revolves around two adult siblings trying to decipher their mother’s deathbed confessions as they imagine her living different lives and identities.

Eleanor Bennett is dead. But before she died from cancer, she had recorded her deep-rooted secrets with the help of her lawyer-boyfriend, Charles Mitch. Charles brings the recordings to Eleanor’s two children, son Byron and daughter Benedetta, or Benny for short. Byron and Benny haven’t spoken to each other in years. An oceanographer on the rise, Byron doesn’t understand his younger sister’s decisions to not stay on the straight and narrow path their Caribbean immigrant parents set them on. Benny, a college dropout, is still trying to establish roots in her career and love life after some heartbreaking moments that she tried to share with her family but felt she was rejected. As the two siblings feel awkward around each other back home in California, they have to sit with Mr. Mitch and listen to the hours of recordings their mother left behind.

Eleanor Bennett was born Coventina “Covey” Lyncook. In the 1950s and 1960s on a Caribbean island similar to Jamaica, Covey loves competitive swimming with her best friend, Bunny. Covey’s father, Johnny “Lin” Lyncook, a Chinese immigrant on the island, owns a general store. He’s also a gambler, so Covey tries to focus on her schoolwork. Her mother is gone and has failed to reach back out to the family. To ease the missingness of Covey’s mother, Pearl, a family friend and the housekeeper, takes it upon herself to watch over Covey. Pearl helps the family while maintaining a successful baking business. Her most requested dessert is the wedding treat of black cake, which Covey learns to make.

Covey’s life is turned upside down when her father promises her hand in marriage to a known moneylender and murderer named Little Man Henry to settle a gambling debt. At 17 years old, Covey knows she doesn’t want to marry this 38-year-old criminal but rather spend her life with Gilbert “Gibbs” Grant, her boyfriend who wants to study abroad in the U.K. for a more promising future. When Little Man Henry falls dead at the wedding with the black cake with lilac icing barely touched, Covey makes a run for it to the waves. The storm brewing above should make the swim precarious, so when Lin finds Covey’s weighty wedding dress on the beach, he believes his daughter is dead.

With assistance, Covey gets to the U.K. to work as a nanny. She must keep a low profile, so she changes her last name since she is a suspect in the murder of Little Man Henry. But she wants more of a career. She enrolls in a nursing program with other Caribbean women. There, she meets a woman her age named Eleanor Bennett. A tragic turn of events forces Covey to become Eleanor to seek the career she wants. Feeling like she dodged another bullet, Eleanor arrives in a workplace where a violent incident and the aftermath change the trajectory of her life again bringing her to the U.S. with a husband and eventually a family.

Black cake is popular in English-speaking Caribbean countries where it’s considered a twist on Christmas plum pudding. It’s usually served on special occasions such as weddings and holidays. In the book, Pearl makes a living with and later without Covey’s mother providing black cakes as Covey becomes an apprentice. With being forced to change her life three times, Covey as Eleanor brings the recipe to her new homeland and teaches the recipe to her daughter. Benny carries an old plastic measuring cup in light of her mother’s death because it gives her comfort. Byron finds a bowl of fruits marinating for the black cake while searching through the kitchen. Their mother would marinate dates and maraschino cherries in rum and port every five years to bake a layer of black cake for her and Bert to enjoy a slice on every wedding anniversary. The dessert becomes a symbol for Eleanor’s children as they bridge her past as a young woman to the mother they always knew. When they learn about another family member, the siblings are determined to bake the black cake to enjoy the dessert their mother always held close to her heart.

Another theme in the book is the ocean. Though Covey leaves home to escape punishment for a crime, her best friend, Bunny, still defends her. Bunny eventually grows up to be Etta Pringle, a global swimming champion. Etta never forgot how Covey inspired her to take those long-distance swims on their island. When Covey as Eleanor becomes a mother, she instills her love of swimming into her children. While Benny loves to bake mainly because of the black cake tradition, Byron loves the ocean as he would surf with his mother. In the U.S., African Americans still deal with the stereotype of not being able to swim, mainly because of the country’s past of discriminating against them and other people of color by cutting off access to pools and waterways. But in countries where the population is predominantly of people of African descent, the waterways represent freedom and the residents are usually strong swimmers. This perspective of people of African descent who love swimming, and not only love the sport but also love the ocean, is refreshing to see as a part of Caribbean culture.

Overall, the book builds up tension well as Covey aka Eleanor tells her autobiography through audio speakers and the events swirl into more events as her children examine her every word and imagine her every situation. More stories have used the theme of the deathbed confession, but some of the characters are considered famous, so their autobiography is worthy of listeners. But this story stands out by featuring a young Caribbean woman, who lacks wholeness without her mother and is forced into an arranged marriage, and how she overcame sexism and racism to get what she wanted in the end though it looked different than what she would have expected. The story has been adapted into a TV series on Hulu. The book would entertain readers who are interested in family secrets and dynamics, oceanic power, and Caribbean history and culture.

Coming off the heels of the historic US Open where we saw tennis legend Serena Williams bid goodbye to the sport, Penguin Random House and its Ballantine Books imprint was in the throes of promoting Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel, Carrie Soto Is Back. The publisher even had a pop-up at Wimbledon over the summer.

The novel focuses on a retired tennis champion who sees her record about to be broken by a younger player, so she feels she must come back to defend her record. Book influencers expressed concern about these characters being women of color trying to defeat each other. Many of these influencers say it’s problematic that a White author pit a Latina title character against an Asian character.

“Carrie Soto Is Back is a story of a Latina tennis player written by a White woman, which we’ve been here before many times,” Tomes and Textiles book influencer Carmen Alvarez said in a reel published on Instagram and TikTok to her combined nearly 60,000 followers. “You’d be surprised to find out that Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Carrie Soto Is Back has more untranslated Spanish than any book I ever read, even by Latinx authors.”

White authors who center stories around Hispanic and Latine characters tend to get higher paychecks and more marketing dollars compared to Hispanic and Latine authors who write authentic stories about their communities and cultures, she adds. She likens the tennis novel to the American Dirt controversy in 2020 where Jeanine Cummins, who later identified as White Latina, wrote a immigration novel that performed well in sales despite the lack of immigration stories by Hispanic and Latine authors getting the same publishing attention.

Book influencers brought up the issue of Taylor giving voice to another Latina main character in her popular 2017 novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. This half-historical fiction novel follows a Latina actress, who passes as White by dying her hair blonde, as she becomes a Hollywood legend. At the end of her life, she plucks a biracial journalist, who is half-Black and half-White, to write her tell-all. It turns out Evelyn and her husband each carried their own queer love affairs in an agreement to not reveal their sexual orientation.

Though the well-paced book gained prominence and favorable reviews, the criticism started to surface since the author, who is White, created a secretly queer Latina main character, a biracial character, and other characters who are queer and non-White. Those allegations are resurfacing with the recent release of Carrie Soto Is Back, featuring another Latina main character.

BookTuber Jesse Morales-Small is the voice behind Bowties and Books and identifies as an “Afro-Chicano book nerd.” They created a video about not being excited about this book despite the major marketing push and voiced concerns about the racial dynamics in the novel.

“You came out of retirement because an Asian woman broke your record. You’re like, ‘I must come out and uproot my life.’ Bitch, just sit down and relax,” they said in a video from March.

“I’m worried about how the story might go,” they continue. “This narrative of this White woman coming out of retirement, so that she can reassert her record over an Asian woman, I don’t know…It’s just with the story being written by a White woman, it makes me feel weird.”

This is before readers realized Carolina “Carrie” Soto is Argentinian American and the opponent threatening her record is Nicki Chan, who is British Chinese. Carrie’s manager during the comeback is Gwen Davis, a Los Angeles-bred Black woman.

Another problem associated with mentioning women of color is White female authors tend to emphasize these characters’ beauty, which they do not do with their White female characters. Because White women are considered the standard gold of beauty and attraction, it becomes a problem when the author brings up the issue when describing a character of color.

Here’s an example of when we’re introduced to Gwen, again a Black woman who is living in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Uprising and currently dealing with the racially tense O.J. Simpson murder trial as the city is reeling from the January 1994 Northridge earthquake. These impactful events are not referenced except a small O.J. trial mention in a fake media report, which is a huge oversight in relation to the characters with LA roots. Carrie’s comeback and perception of women are all that matters:

“I turn toward Gwen as she sits down on the sofa next to me. She’s in her late fifties, dressed in a red pantsuit and mules. Sometimes I wonder if she’s in the wrong field; she’s too striking, too glamorous to be the one behind the scenes… Something about that Gwen doesn’t care what her assistant wears in the office while she, herself, looks like a runway model makes me like them both even more.”

So, Gwen is a Naomi Campbell-type because any other Black woman wouldn’t fit the narrative of a tough manager. At this racially turbulent time in Los Angeles, a native-born Black woman would have been impacted by these events to some degree, as well as a Latina like Carrie. They wouldn’t be so worried about their looks unless those looks were under a criminal attack.

Nicki, Carrie’s sworn enemy, is also said to be beautiful on more than one occasion. Here’s a scenario where Carrie meets Nicki’s eyes as they sit in the audience of a match before they spar in the French Open. All Carrie can think about is how Nicki looks:

“Her long, broad body is unmistakable. Her strong, muscular arms. Her wide shoulders. Her long black hair. Nobody ever talks about it much—which is telling—but Nicki Chan is gorgeous. Showstoppingly gorgeous. A round face with high cheekbones, full lips.

“Other women in tennis—blond women with big boobs and long legs—often get modeling contracts at age seventeen. They show up on the cover of men’s magazines within a year or so of hitting the court for the first time.

“But not thicker women, like me. Or dark-skinned women like Carla Perez or Suze Carter. Not women who are British Chinese, like Nicki, or downright scary in their intensity like her either. Not the women who aren’t skinny and white and smiling.”

When characters of color are central to a book, some type of struggle tied to racial and cultural identity has to come up because for people of color that’s everyday real life. So, not receiving an adequate background on Carrie Soto only that her father came from Argentina for tennis opportunities and her mother died young shows the lack of deeper understanding of representing an Argentinian American woman who becomes one of the top athletes in the world in the 1980s.

To Tomes and Textiles’ Carmen’s point, there is a lot of untranslated Spanish interweaved with English. This is to make sure the reader gets what’s going on without translating the Spanish. If you’re around enough nonnative English speakers like myself, they usually do not weave English with their native language so often, especially when talking to a family member, because that’s not natural. English will come up for words that are only in English, such as a brand name like Kleenex or Starbucks. So, the use of Spanish looks gimmicky.

Overall, the book is unfortunately a snooze. Authors put themselves in their characters’ shoes by doing extensive research, but in this case Carrie’s story is not entertaining enough. It takes place on another timeline, but tennis stars Gabriela Sabatini, who is Argentinian, and Mary Joe Fernández, who is Dominican, would be able to tell us eye-opening stories about competing in professional tennis as Hispanic and Latine women in the 1980s and 1990s.