Book Review: Better Must Come by Desmond Hall

Life in Jamaica outside of the tourist hotspots is a far cry from the image of paradise its government wants to portray. With jobs scarce, many have turned to gangs or migrated overseas in order to make ends meet for themselves and their families. Deja’s mom is one of the latter, trying to make a living in New York City while Deja goes to school and looks after her younger siblings back on the island. Every few months, Mom sends a barrel home filled with goods for her kids, to the envy of their neighbors. 

But when Deja’s mom is mugged, losing all of her savings and more, the next barrel is indefinitely postponed, as is the next infusion of cash. Deja has to struggle to keep her siblings fed and their bills paid while Mom scrambles to recoup her losses. Deja would almost rather her mom came home, but knows that their current course of action is what makes the most sense financially. Perhaps the hardest thing of all for Deja is knowing that she has no one to talk to about any of her problems:

Deja wearily closed her eyes for a moment. Nobody expected girls with barrels to have to worry about things like this. In fact, it was an unwritten rule: barrel girls were considered luckier than everybody else in Jamaica and no longer had any right to complain about anything. Yet everyone made such a big deal about it–acted like Deja had it made because she got a container of stuff from the States. No one thought about the fact that to get it, her mother had to live fifteen hundred miles away!

Deja is out skipping school and fishing in hopes of a catch she can sell to tourists one morning when she stumbles across a go-fast boat with someone badly injured inside. She really doesn’t want to get involved, but her conscience won’t let her leave the man aboard alone to die either. The injured man reveals to her that he’s an agent with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and that she needs to quickly and covertly bring a backpack of cash to his contact in Mobay. He promises that his contact will reward her, before he passes out again. 

Having done her best to patch him up, Deja takes off with the backpack, calling for emergency services to come help him as she flees to fulfill his request. Ordinarily, she’d decline what’s clearly a shady and potentially dangerous errand, but she needs the reward money badly. She’ll just have to trust that the man is really who he says he is, and not a gangster looking to dupe a young woman trying desperately to keep her family together. 

Meanwhile, an actual gangster named Gabriel is trying to figure out how to escape a sticky situation of his own. Rumor has it that his boss no longer trusts him and is looking for a way to get rid of him. When he’s sent with his best friend and fellow gang member Hammer to the scene of a drug deal gone terribly wrong, he’s put on the trail of a teenage girl with a backpack, and told to return with the cash or else.

But Gabriel and Deja have already crossed paths before, finding a surprising kinship with one another despite their differences. What lengths will the teenagers have to go to now in order to protect themselves, while doing everything they possibly can to avoid irreparably hurting each other?

This action-packed yet emotionally sensitive Young Adult thriller shows an underside of Jamaica that most people don’t know about, as Gabriel and Deja grapple with poverty and crime while trying to keep their souls and dignity intact. Forced to take on adult responsibilities far too soon, their coping mechanisms mostly involve silence, which Desmond Hall gently shows is not the answer:

Hand still over her mouth, the girl said, “That had to be awful. Amazing you can even talk about it!”

 

Truth was, he never had. Not even to Hammer. And hearing her talk about it made him feel suddenly shaky, like he needed to sit down.

 

She must have sensed it, because suddenly she was grasping his forearm, her grip strong. “Hey, you all right?”

 

Gabriel wasn’t sure–it was as though talking about his aunt flooded him with everything she’d done–and he felt…shame. When it was just his awful secret, he had pretty much held it all in check. But now, out in the open, the embarrassment rained down. And yet…at the same time he felt…well, he wasn’t sure, as he’d never quite felt this before, but almost like…he was lighter. A sense of…relief.

Learning to communicate and admit when you need help is only one of the valuable lessons this book imparts. Deja and Gabriel are both resilient and creative, but most of all they care about others and genuinely want to do more good in the world. The cat and mouse game they’re reluctantly forced into is gripping, and occasionally hilarious when outsiders interfere. I was genuinely rooting for them both till the very end of this brave, enthralling novel.