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  • Location: New York city, Port au Prince

My Mother’s House

My Mother’s House

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: The complex underbelly of the immigrant American dream

  • ISBN: 978-0525657156
  • Genre: Fiction

What you need to know before your trail

When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a rundown house in a community that is quickly changing from an Italian enclave of mobsters to a haven for Haitian immigrants, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay–“my mother’s house”–and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and legal help. But as a severely emotionally damaged man emigrating from a country whose evils he knows to one whose evils he doesn’t, Lucien soon falls into his worst habits and impulses, with La Kay as the backdrop for his lasciviousness. What he can’t even begin to fathom is that the house is watching, passing judgment, and deciding to put an end to all the sins it has been made to hold. But only after it has set itself aflame will frightened whispers reveal Lucien’s ultimate evil.

Travel Guide

Travel from Haiti to New York to My Mother’s House

Haiti

The country and city of Port au Prince appears briefly to show the journey the family take on their way top their new life in New York. The history of immigration from these parts is interesting.

 

South Ozone Park Queens

This is the one Italian neighbourhood where the family move into and they are a mixed immigrant community of mainly Caribbean people.

They call their house Kay Manman Mwen which is ‘my mother’s house’ or KAM for short.

The house being an entity of evil is scary – the house is a kind of Big Brother entity and it comments on all that goes on underneath its roof and in its basement. You will never look at houses in the same way again.

BookTrail Boarding Pass: My Mother’s House

Destination/location: New York, Haiti  Author/guide: Francesca Montplaisir  Departure Time: 2000s

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