Book Review: People Person by Candice Carty Williams

British Jamaicans have been present in the UK for over three generations and have left an indelible mark on British culture and society. How could they not? With over three hundred thousand “yardies” living in the UK, they have influenced everything from food, to slang to music, just to name a few. One of their more prolific members, Candice Carty-Williams, is firmly planting the black, yellow and green flag into the literary sphere of the UK along with the rest of the world with her latest novel, People Person. 

The showrunner, culture writer and author’s debut novel, Queenie, was released in 2019 to rave reviews from various publications including O, The Oprah Magazine, Time magazine and USA Today. The coming-of-age story about a young British Jamaican woman in present day South London navigating issues around love, heartbreak, blackness, sex and identity has been adapted into an eight-episode television series which is currently filming to be aired in 2024. Carty-William’s second book, People Person, introduces us to another young British Jamaican woman in present day South London named Dimple Pennington, a thirty-year-old aspiring lifestyle influencer that makes a modest income from her online following that totals less than a hundred people. Her entire world is contained in that phone screen, with her only meaningful connections outside of it being her mother Janet and her unruly boyfriend, Kyron. 

Despite her tiny but loyal online followers and aforementioned real life relationships, Dimple feels lost and forgotten in a world where she feels like a burden to everyone she knows. We also meet her father Cyril and the four other children that he produced with three different mothers aside from Dimple’s. Cyril is many things – a lady’s man, smooth operator, and hard worker - but father of the year is definitely not one of them. In his own words, the Jamaican born man simply doesn’t have it in him to be a good father. Because of his neglect, Dimple and her siblings barely have a relationship with each other, despite the fact that they have all spent their entire lives in South London. That changes one fateful night when a tragic event forces Dimple and her half siblings Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie, and Prynce to come together and begin a wild journey of self-discovery, forgiveness, and familial love.

Carty-Williams has a special talent for bringing readers into the culture of British Jamaicans while also finding ways to connect that to the global Caribbean immigrant experience as a whole with witty and memorable prose filled with colorful patois and universally shared memories that serve as the interconnection between the islands. One of my favorite parts of the book was during a repast after a funeral where Dimple describes serving the guests like working in customer service. “Nobody was happy with the portion sizes. Things weren’t hot enough. Things were too hot. The jerk chicken wasn’t spicy enough. The fried chicken had too much crumb. The macaroni and cheese was too rich.” Reading that passage made me chuckle to myself as I reminisced on my own grandmother’s funeral decades ago in Tobago, where a similar scenario played out among my family members who quickly forgot their grief when the cuisine wasn’t to their liking.

There’s an ample number of characters in People Person, and discovering each one as they navigate their budding relationships with each other while also reflecting on the relationship (or non-relationship) they have with Cyril is where this book shines. While the story is told mainly from the point of view of Dimple, her father is clearly, and ironically, the “people person” that the title refers to. Each of his children and their mothers are introduced in relation to how they met the enigmatic character and how his behavior has affected their lives since. They all have their own dynamic storylines that are expertly developed throughout the novel but their point of views, actions and experiences always seem to revolve around Cyril’s behavior. He’s portrayed as manipulative, exploitative, braggadocious and uses his sexual conquests and ability to procreate as a way to mask his feelings of inadequacy and inferiority that stem from painful events in his childhood. 

This is an all too familiar trope in Caribbean communities and Carty-Willians does an amazing job of conveying this. As the story unfolds, she uses the absentee father to illustrate the deep emotional scars that immigrating to large nations such as the UK or the United States can leave on someone. There are subtle nods to pivotal events like the “Windrush Generation”, which was composed of men and women in the 1940’s and 50’s that were lured from their various Caribbean islands to the UK by the promise of a large number of jobs in the aftermath of two global wars. Tempted by the hope of employment and stability, heads of households , both men and women, left their families behind with the hopes of “sending” for them after establishing themselves.

While this novel so vividly captures the harsh realities of the generational trauma that immigration can inflict, showing how our identities are shaped by these issues as well as our relationships and shared history, it also illustrates the beautiful bonds that can be forged from such adversities. I thoroughly enjoyed the way that Dimple and her siblings were forced to confront the ways that Cyril’s absence in their lives and the vastly different ways they were raised by mothers united in heartbreak affected them individually and as a fractured family. People Person is an inspirational and satisfying read with unbelievable plot twists and characters that you can’t help but have empathy and high hopes for as they learn to not allow deep hurt and disappointment to prevent them from loving themselves and each other.