...there's no character in Dennis-Benn's novel that's anything less than complex, multifaceted, and breathtakingly real. That's part of what makes Here Comes the Sun one of the most stunningly beautiful novels in recent years ... Dennis-Benn's writing is so assured, so gorgeous, that it's hard to believe Here Comes the Sun is a debut novel. There are no wasted words; every sentence is constructed with care and a clear eye ... tough, beautiful and necessary, and it feels like a miracle.
This lithe, artfully-plotted debut concerns itself with the lives of those for whom tourists can barely be bothered to remove their Ray-Bans ... Much of the dialogue in Here Comes the Sun is written in this patois. It’s one of the book’s incidental pleasures, its own melodious tune ... Margot is one of the reasons to read this book. She is a startling, deeply memorable character. All of Ms. Dennis-Benn’s women are. The author has a gift for creating chiaroscuro portraits, capturing both light and dark. In almost every scene, she conveys how the molecules shift around Margot, the air vibrating with the tension between her stone-cold resolve and her electric sexuality ... Here Comes the Sun is deceptively well-constructed, with slow and painful reveals right through the end. Just who’s able to give history the slip, and at what cost, is one of the saddest things you’ll ever read.
Dennis-Benn has drawn each of her characters confidently, never shying from the fact that their choices are both problematic and necessary for survival in a town that is disappearing beneath their feet ... While desire, value and exploitation are themes that run throughout the book, Here Comes The Sun ultimately becomes a meditation on the perversion of love, and the unscrupulous means to attain it ... That is the paradox of paradise, as Dennis-Benn illustrates it here: the beautiful resort surrounded by squalor, the striving of the poor classes riddled with complications of its own. And happiness or love – sweetness– is just within grasp but rots when neglected.
