One Year of Ugly

By: Caroline Mackenzie

Narrated by: Inés del Castillo

Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's Summary

Set in Trinidad, and told with wry humour and irresistible wit, One Year of Ugly is a story of family, first love and finding home.

When their beloved Aunt Celia dies, Yola and her family discover she had been keeping a huge secret – she was seriously in debt to local criminal, Ugly, and they must do his bidding until the debt is cleared.

So far, so ugly.

And then Ugly’s distracting gorgeous right-hand man Román arrives on the scene, and Yola just can't help herself. Could this wildly inappropriate (and very messy) romance be the perfect antidote?

©2020 Caroline Mackenzie (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic Reviews

"A glorious, darkly funny read that simply roars off the page." (RED Magazine)

"Deliciously dark." (Emma Jane Unsworth)

 "Funny and important." (Laura Jane Williams)

Addictive! Hilarious and Educational

Could not stop listening! And as a fellow Trinidadian it enlightened me and brought to my attention so many things I never really thought about before. Excellent and well written. So proud of this author and that she is from my country!

A Spellbinding Contemporary Caribbean Tale

As a lover of Caribbean literature, a comic novel about a family of Venezuelan migrants living clandestinely in Trinidad and Tobago easily piqued my interest. The tale of how the Palacio's resettled lives are turned upside down when they are forced to turn their homes into a safehouse for newly arrived Venezuelans, the precarity of their own situation becomes apparent to them. Caroline McKenzie's novel is bursting with love. The characters are vivacious, loving and complex, the story is told by Yola, both in mourning for her favourite aunt, and navigating an intense but dangerous romance, and the adventure is a thrilling ride involving her whole hilarious displaced close-knit extended family. This is contemporary Trinidad as I've never seen it.

My only complaint is the narration. The accents are AWFUL. McKenzie is a Trini who went to England for university. She speaks with a Trini accent, and her Trini characters speak Trini-inflected English, as do the Palacio family members in public. McKenzie drops British words like 'twat' in occasionally. The American-sounding narrator's impression of a Trini accent is simply offensive and she also mispronounces British slang. Why the author, another Trini, or a Venezuelan or native Spanish speaker who could reflect the changing accents more accurately didn't narrate One Year of Ugly is a mystery. The descriptions of contemporary Trinidad are so vivid, it is a shame they take on the detached air of the voyeuristic tourist's inpression rather than the intimate discovery of a new home just because the narrator doesn't sound like any kind of local. A real shame as it takes away from the fabulous prose. Read this, don't listen to it.

Huge ambition, totally failed to deliver

Where do I start. Unlike able characters, barren plot, frothy depiction of refuge issues, part written by a thesaurus. Just awful

The narrator is brilliant!!

Loved the story immensely- brilliantly light and yet extremely thought provoking.

The narration elevates it in the audio form without a doubt. Excellent pacing!!