Title: Little Back Room A collection of short stories
Author: Pearl Rance Reardon
Publisher: iUniverse
Reviewer: Barbara Nelson

Jamaica-born Pearl Rance-Reardon emigrated to the United States in 1968. She has served on an American university panel designed to attract adult students back to college, and has authored three play performances and several published poems.

Little Back Room begins with the story of Cinderella Marvelous Green, a teacher in rural Jamaica, on one of her monthly shopping trips to the city. "Teacher Green has arrived in one piece, praise God and God save the Queen," she announces dramatically on her arrival. Teacher Green stays with her friend Lottie who allows Pringle, "a nice quiet (half-Indian) gentleman" to stay in the little room behind hers. Lottie's six-year-old granddaughter, Elah, "a little force-ripe banana", showers attention on Teacher Green, while the tired educator removes the garter belts - stiff pieces of elastic tied below her knees - and complains bitterly about the dunces who pilot the buses around Devil's Race Course."

Accommodation with nature

In the story titled Breakfast Time, the reader learns more about Elah. She was a "red gal, a reddibo", who calls her mother 'Sister' and her grandmother 'Mama'. Elah travels to the country once each year to spend three weeks in a village where there was no running water, not even a pit toilet, and where "there was a co-existence and an accommodation with nature." She went by bus and stopped at Miss Mac's little shop with its "narrow showcase for biscuits, candies and cakes." Miss Mac lived in the little back room.

In The Shape of a Stone Elah yearns to become an adult and get away from all the 'foolish' rules she had obey, like: "Do not speak to every bongo you meet on the street", "don't sit like a market woman", "put a handle to big people's names; you are too equalising and facety."

Elah visits her 15-year-old cousin Dolores in jail. Dolores is awaiting trial for murder. She did not want to disgrace her family, especially her mother, who was an official in the Salvation Army. So, she killed the baby she was carrying when it was born. Elah's mother Louise (who also had Elah when she was 15 years old) told her: "It was the prettiest Chiney Royal boy baby."

Pornographic workshop

Elah goes to the city to find a job and in Roommates for Life we learn of some of the experiences she has there. She finds a job at Paradise Fabrics "alongside a raunchy clique of women - every day was like being in a pornographic workshop for sluts. Elah found this exciting." She stayed with her cousin Nell at Mrs Broderick's home. Broderick was a Jehovah's Witness and offered Elah the little back room for a reasonable price at her home in Wareika Hills. But, Elah had other plans.

The book is fairly long - 245 pages with relatively small print. Each story is unique, captivating and very entertaining.

The other stories are: Junior File Clerk, A Lizard in the Teapot, Confessions of Leopold Shade, The Oblong Light and Zanesville dot com.

The last story, Zanesville dot com, is particularly funny and it has a twist at the end. When 32-year-old Selma Savage's mother tells her it's time for her to find a job and some rich man to take care of her and her three-year-old daughter, Selma pretends to be surfing the Web to find employment. Instead, she finds William 'Bucky' Smoot, a 40-year-old man who is living with his parents in Zanesville, Ohio.

"When he smiled, I knew right away why they called him Bucky," Selma says.

They got married, but Selma soon found herself surfing the Internet once again. This time flirting with a guy who said he wanted to date a married woman. He said a jealous husband would turn him on.

Pearl Rance-Reardon was an At Large Nominator for the Helen Hayes Award. She moderated the film segment of the Maryland Film Office multi-cultural conference that drew notable film-makers from Hollywood. She lives in Washington, DC.