The women in V. K. Mina's urbane collection of short stories,
The Splintered Day (Serpent's Tail, 214 pp., $14.00) are quick-minded,
dark-skinned girls looking for love in all the wrong places.
Mina's frank and witty prose often follows an unruly narrative path,
slipping from past to present with an engaging grace. In "How I Made
Love to a Negro," the unnamed Asian narrator is all of 16 when she
discovers Dany Laferrière's book, How to Make Love to a Negro. Soon
after, she meets her first black lover, who rejects her because she's too
dark.
--Lawrence Chua
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