How The One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is an audacious debut novel, set in Baxter's Beach, Barbados. It starkly depicts the stories of those people living on the jagged edges of Paradise.

Lala is a curious eighteen-year-old girl with a talent for braiding hair, but her life has always been troubling and things worsen when she loses her newborn baby girl to a tragic accident. Lala's abusive husband, Adan, is involved in a robbery that goes wrong and ends in man's murder. These two events escalate and converge into a devastating ending.

This book can be described as domestic crime fiction and it features such distressing things as abusive relationships, sexual assault, child death, rape, drug use, misogyny, paranoia and child abuse.

I struggled with the first 90 pages of this book. It had such a slow start coupled with a feeling of monotony that was hard to maintain focus on. There were moments where overuse of the word 'and' was telling, however, I also feel like that particular sentence structure had a purpose, as though intended to reflect the relentlessness of the many trials the characters face.

For readers that struggle with books that are slow burners at the beginning, this book does get much better if you stick with it and the payoff is well worth it. I thought the non-linear way the story developed and the way it ended more than redeemed any grievances I had at the start. I loved the dauntless, unwavering nature of this book.